The process of individualization from the Middle Ages to the renaissance in the special case of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and Michel de Montaigne's Essays

In the Middle Ages, a way of life was shaped around Christian teachings and the church, which determined the atmosphere of the period through the reinterpretation of written data, taking its source from the Holy Book. Therefore, the differences between public and private life in one's life were quite small. The human being began to be viewed as valuable in the individual sense with Renaissance, and world and the human beings living in the period became an object of study. The study aims to examine the phenomenon of individuality in the "Divine Comedy" by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and the "Essays" by the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and to compare the human beings of the Middle Ages with the human beings of the Renaissance. It is underlined in the Divine Comedy that one's actions result in reward and punishment in line with sin or good deeds. On the other hand, the individual is dealt with in every aspect in Essays on the basis of the idea that life and human beings are a set of contradictions. In this context, it is observed that the concept of individual comes to the fore as a being who makes free choices with reason and will, while preserving its unique qualities. In general terms, the method of the study is the Eclectic (Pluralistic) Method, since the method of sociological and historical analysis is used mainly for the purpose of revealing the differences between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period and determining the individualization process of the individual. It has been determined that the collective consciousness of the Middle Ages is replaced by consciousness of the individual during the Renaissance in the context of these two texts. Therefore, the human being of the Middle Ages, who lived a life shaped and framed around the commandments of God and the teachings of the church, as well as the thinking, questioning, criticizing human beings of the Renaissance have been attempted to be comparatively analyzed in terms of virtue, morality, belief, entertainment strings, their place in the world, the reason for their existence and the differences between both periods. KEYWORDS: Individualization, Dante, Montaigne, Middle Ages, Renaissance.