The Renaissance
Few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist and western
Europe-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of
modernity and progress. A sharp break with medieval values and
institutions, a new awareness of the individual, an awakened interest in
the material world and nature, and a recovery of the cultural heritage
of ancient Greece and Rome—these were once understood to be the major
achievements of the Renaissance. Today, every particular of this formula
is under suspicion if not altogether repudiated. Nevertheless, the term
Renaissance remains a widely recognized label for the multifaceted
period between the heyday of medieval universalism, as embodied in the
Papacy and Holy Roman Empire, and the convulsions and sweeping
transformations of the 17th century.
In this period some important innovations of the Middle Ages came
into their own, including the revival of urban life, commercial
enterprise based on private capital, banking, the formation of states,
systematic investigation of the physical world, classical scholarship,
and vernacular literatures. In religious life the Renaissance was a time
of the broadening and institutionalizing of earlier initiatives in lay
piety and lay-sponsored clerical reforms, rather than of the abandonment
of traditional beliefs. In government, city-states and regional and
national principalities supplanted the fading hegemony of the empire and
the Papacy and obliterated many of the local feudal jurisdictions that
had covered Europe, although within states power continued to be
monopolized by elites drawing their strength from both landed and
mercantile wealth. If there was a Renaissance “rediscovery of the world
and of man,” as the 19th-century historians Jules Michelet (in the
seventh volume of his History of France) and Jacob Burckhardt (in The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]) asserted, it can be
found mainly in literature and art, influenced by the latest and most
successful of a long series of medieval classical revivals. For all but
exceptional individuals and a few marginal groups, the standards of
behaviour continued to arise from traditional social and moral codes.
Identity derived from class, family, occupation, and community, although
each of these social forms was itself undergoing significant
modification. Thus, for example, while there is no substance to
Burckhardt’s notion that in Italy women enjoyed perfect equality with
men, the economic and structural features of Renaissance patrician
families may have enhanced the scope of activity and influence of women
of that class. Finally, the older view of the Renaissance centred too
exclusively on Italy, and within Italy on a few cities—Florence, Venice,
and Rome. By discarding false dichotomies—Renaissance versus Middle
Ages, classical versus Gothic, modern versus feudal—one is able to grasp
more fully the interrelatedness of Italy with the rest of Europe and to
investigate the extent to which the great centres of Renaissance
learning and art were nourished and influenced by less exalted towns and
by changes in the pattern of rural life.
Additional treatment of Renaissance thought and intellectual activity
can be found in humanism and classical scholarship.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Urban growth
Although town revival was a general feature of 10th- and 11th-century
Europe (associated with an upsurge in population that is not completely
understood), in Italy the urban imprint of Roman times had never been
erased. By the 11th century, the towers of new towns, and, more
commonly, of old towns newly revived, began to dot the spiny Italian
landscape—eye-catching creations of a burgeoning population literally
brimming with new energy due to improved diets. As in Roman times, the
medieval Italian town lived in close relation to its surrounding rural
area, or contado; Italian city folk seldom relinquished their ties to
the land from which they and their families had sprung. Rare was the
successful tradesman or banker who did not invest some of his profits in
the family farm or a rural noble who did not spend part of the year in
his house inside city walls. In Italian towns, knights, merchants,
rentiers, and skilled craftsmen lived and worked side by side, fought in
the same militia, and married into each other’s families. Social
hierarchy there was, but it was a tangled system with no simple division
between noble and commoner, between landed and commercial wealth. That
landed magnates took part in civic affairs helps explain the early
militancy of the townsfolk in resisting the local bishop, who was
usually the principal claimant to lordship in the community. Political
action against a common enemy tended to infuse townspeople with a sense
of community and civic loyalty. By the end of the 11th century, civic
patriotism began to express itself in literature; city chronicles
combined fact and legend to stress a city’s Roman origins and, in some
cases, its inheritance of Rome’s special mission to rule. Such motifs
reflect the cities’ achievement of autonomy from their respective
episcopal or secular feudal overlords and, probably, the growth of
rivalries between neighbouring communities.
Rivalry between towns was part of the expansion into the neighbouring
countryside, with the smaller and weaker towns submitting to the
domination of the larger and stronger. As the activity of the towns
became more complex, sporadic collective action was replaced by
permanent civic institutions. Typically, the first of these was an
executive magistracy, named the consulate (to stress the continuity with
republican Rome). In the late 11th and early 12th centuries, this
process—consisting of the establishment of juridical autonomy, the
emergence of a permanent officialdom, and the spread of power beyond the
walls of the city to the contado and neighbouring towns—was well under
way in about a dozen Italian centres and evident in dozens more; the
loose urban community was becoming a corporate entity, or commune; the
city was becoming a city-state.
The typical 13th-century city-state was a republic administering a
territory of dependent towns; whether it was a democracy is a question
of definition. The idea of popular sovereignty existed in political
thought and was reflected in the practice of calling a parlamento, or
mass meeting, of the populace in times of emergency; but in none of the
republics were the people as a whole admitted to regular participation
in government. On the other hand, the 13th century saw the
establishment, after considerable struggle, of assemblies in which some
portion of the male citizenry, restricted by property and other
qualifications, took part in debate, legislation, and the selection of
officials. Most offices were filled by men serving on a rotating,
short-term basis. If the almost universal obligation of service in the
civic militia is also considered, it becomes clear that participation in
the public life of the commune was shared by a considerable part of the
male population, although the degree of participation varied from one
commune to another and tended to decline. Most of the city republics
were small enough (in 1300 Florence, one of the largest, had perhaps
100,000 people; Padua, nearer the average, had about 15,000) so that
public business was conducted by and for citizens who knew each other,
and civic issues were a matter of widespread and intense personal
concern.
The darker side of this intense community life was conflict. It
became a cliché of contemporary observers that when townsmen were not
fighting their neighbours they were fighting each other. Machiavelli
explained this as the result of the natural enmity between nobles and
“the people—the former desiring to command, the latter unwilling to
obey.” This contains an essential truth: a basic problem was the unequal
distribution of power and privilege, but the class division was further
complicated by factional rivalry within the ruling groups and by
ideological differences—Guelfism, or loyalty to the pope, versus
Ghibellinism, or vassalage to the German emperors. The continuing
leadership of the old knightly class, with its violent feudal ways and
the persistence of a winner-take-all conception of politics, guaranteed
bloody and devastating conflict. Losers could expect to be condemned to
exile, with their houses burned and their property confiscated. Winners
had to be forever vigilant against the unending conspiracies of exiles
yearning to return to their homes and families.
During the 14th century a number of cities, despairing of finding a
solution to the problem of civic strife, were turning from republicanism
to signoria, the rule of one man. The signore, or lord, was usually a
member of a local feudal family that was also a power in the commune;
thus, lordship did not appear to be an abnormal development,
particularly if the signore chose, as most did, to rule through existing
republican institutions. Sometimes a signoria was established as the
result of one noble faction’s victory over another, while in a few cases
a feudal noble who had been hired by the republic as its condottiere, or
military captain, became its master. Whatever the process, hereditary
lordship had become the common condition and free republicanism the
exception by the late 14th century. Contrary to what Burckhardt
believed, Italy in the 14th century had not shaken off feudalism. In the
south, feudalism was entrenched in the loosely centralized Kingdom of
Naples, successor state to the Hohenstaufen and Norman kingdoms. In
central and northern Italy, feudal lordship and knightly values merged
with medieval communal institutions to produce the typical state of the
Renaissance. Where the nobles were excluded by law from political
participation in the commune, as in the Tuscan cities of Florence,
Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, parliamentary republicanism had a longer life;
but even these bastions of liberty had intervals of disguised or open
lordship. The great maritime republic of Venice reversed the usual
process by increasing the powers of its councils at the expense of the
doge (from Latin dux, “leader”). However, Venice never had a feudal
nobility, only a merchant aristocracy that called itself noble and
jealously guarded its hereditary sovereignty against incursions from
below.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Wars of expansion
There were new as well as traditional elements in the Renaissance
city-state. Changes in the political and economic situation affected the
evolution of government, while the growth of the humanist movement
influenced developing conceptions of citizenship, patriotism, and civic
history. The decline in the ability of both the empire and the Papacy to
dominate Italian affairs as they had done in the past left each state
free to pursue its own goals within the limits of its resources. These
goals were, invariably, the security and power of each state vis-à-vis
its neighbours. Diplomacy became a skilled game of experts; rivalries
were deadly, and warfare was endemic. Because the costs of war were
all-consuming, particularly as mercenary troops replaced citizen
militias, the states had to find new sources of revenue and develop
methods of securing public credit. Governments borrowed from
moneylenders (stimulating the development of banking), imposed customs
duties, and levied fines; but, as their costs continued to exceed
revenues, they came up with new solutions such as the forced loan,
funded debt, and taxes on property and income. New officials with
special skills were required to take property censuses (the catasto),
calculate assessments, and manage budgets, as well as to provision
troops, take minutes of council meetings, administer justice, write to
other governments, and send instructions to envoys and other agents. All
this required public space—council, judicial, and secretarial rooms,
storage space for bulging archives, and both closed and open-air
ceremonial settings where officials interacted with the citizenry and
received foreign visitors. As secular needs joined and blended with
religious ones, towns took their place alongside the church and the
monasteries as patrons of builders, painters, and sculptors (often the
same persons). In the late 13th century, great programs of public
building and decoration were begun that were intended to symbolize and
portray images of civic power and beneficence and to communicate the
values of “the common good.” Thus the expansion of the functions of the
city-state was accompanied by the development of a public ideology and a
civic rhetoric intended to make people conscious of their blessings and
responsibilities as citizens.
The city-state tended to subsume many of the protective and
associative functions and loyalties connected with clan, family, guild,
and party. Whether it fostered individualism by replacing traditional
forms of association—as Burckhardt, Alfred von Martin, and other
historians have claimed—is problematic. The Renaissance “discovery of
the individual” is a nebulous concept, lending itself to many different
meanings. It could be argued, for example, that the development of
communal law, with its strong Roman influence, enhanced individual
property rights or that participatory government promoted a
consciousness of individual value. It could also be argued, however,
that the city-state was a more effective controller of the loyalty and
property of its members than were feudal jurisdictions and voluntary
associations. In some respects the great merchants and bankers of the
Renaissance, operating in international markets, had more freedom than
local tradespeople, who were subject to guild restrictions, communal
price and quality controls, and usury laws; but the economic ideal of
Renaissance states was mercantilism, not free private enterprise.
Amid the confusion of medieval Italian politics, a new pattern of
relations emerged by the 14th century. No longer revolving in the papal
or in the imperial orbit, the stronger states were free to assert their
hegemony over the weaker, and a system of regional power centres
evolved. From time to time the more ambitious states, especially those
that had brought domestic conflict under control, made a bid for a wider
hegemony in the peninsula, such as Milan attempted under the lordship of
the Visconti family. In the 1380s and ’90s Gian Galeazzo Visconti pushed
Milanese power eastward as far as Padua, at the very doorstep of Venice,
and southward to the Tuscan cities of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena and even to
Perugia in papal territory. Some believed that Gian Galeazzo meant to be
king of Italy; whether or not this is true, he would probably have
overrun Florence, the last outpost of resistance in central Italy, had
he not died suddenly in 1402, leaving a divided inheritance and much
confusion. In the 1420s, under Filippo Maria, Milan began to expand
again; but by then Venice, with territorial ambitions of its own, had
joined with Florence to block Milan’s advance, while the other Italian
states took sides or remained neutral according to their own interests.
The mid-15th century saw the Italian peninsula embroiled in a turmoil of
intrigues, plots, revolts, wars, and shifting alliances, of which the
most sensational was the reversal that brought the two old enemies,
Florence and Milan, together against Venetian expansion. This
“diplomatic revolution,” supported by Cosimo de’ Medici, the unofficial
head of the Florentine republic, is the most significant illustration of
the emergence of balance-of-power diplomacy in Renaissance Italy.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Italian humanism
The notion that ancient wisdom and eloquence lay slumbering in the Dark
Ages until awakened in the Renaissance was the creation of the
Renaissance itself. The idea of the revival of classical antiquity is
one of those great myths, comparable to the idea of the universal
civilizing mission of imperial Rome or to the idea of progress in a
modern industrial society, by which an era defines itself in history.
Like all such myths, it is a blend of fact and invention. Classical
thought and style permeated medieval culture in ways past counting. Most
of the authors known to the Renaissance were known to the Middle Ages as
well, while the classical texts “discovered” by the humanists were often
not originals but medieval copies preserved in monastic or cathedral
libraries. Moreover, the Middle Ages had produced at least two earlier
revivals of classical antiquity. The so-called Carolingian Renaissance
of the late 8th and 9th centuries saved many ancient works from
destruction or oblivion, passing them down to posterity in its beautiful
minuscule script (which influenced the humanist scripts of the
Renaissance). A 12th-century Renaissance saw the revival of Roman law,
Latin poetry, and Greek science, including almost the whole corpus of
Aristotelian writings known today.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Italian humanism » Growth
of literacy
Nevertheless, the classical revival of the Italian Renaissance was so
different from these earlier movements in spirit and substance that the
humanists might justifiably claim that it was original and unique.
During most of the Middle Ages, classical studies and virtually all
intellectual activities were carried on by churchmen, usually members of
the monastic orders. In the Italian cities, this monopoly was partially
breached by the growth of a literate laity with some taste and need for
literary culture. New professions reflected the growth of both literary
and specialized lay education—the dictatores, or teachers of practical
rhetoric, lawyers, and the ever-present notary (a combination of
solicitor and public recorder). These, and not Burckhardt’s wandering
scholar-clerics, were the true predecessors of the humanists.
In Padua a kind of early humanism emerged, flourished, and declined
between the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Paduan classicism was a
product of the vigorous republican life of the commune, and its decline
coincided with the loss of the city’s liberty. A group of Paduan
jurists, lawyers, and notaries—all trained as dictatores—developed a
taste for classical literature that probably stemmed from their
professional interest in Roman law and their affinity for the history of
the Roman Republic. The most famous of these Paduan classicists was
Albertino Mussato, a poet, historian, and playwright, as well as lawyer
and politician, whose play Ecerinis, modeled on Seneca, has been called
the first Renaissance tragedy. By reviving several types of ancient
literary forms and by promoting the use of classical models for poetry
and rhetoric, the Paduan humanists helped make the 14th-century Italians
more conscious of their classical heritage; in other respects, however,
they remained close to their medieval antecedents, showing little
comprehension of the vast cultural and historical gulf that separated
them from the ancients.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Italian humanism »
Language and eloquence
It was Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, who first understood fully that
antiquity was a civilization apart and, understanding it, outlined a
program of classically oriented studies that would lay bare its spirit.
The focus of Petrarch’s insight was language: if classical antiquity was
to be understood in its own terms, it would be through the speech with
which the ancients had communicated their thoughts. This meant that the
languages of antiquity had to be studied as the ancients had used them
and not as vehicles for carrying modern thoughts. Thus, grammar, which
included the reading and careful imitation of ancient authors from a
linguistic point of view, was the basis of Petrarch’s entire program.
From the mastery of language, one moved on to the attainment of
eloquence. For Petrarch, as for Cicero, eloquence was not merely the
possession of an elegant style, nor yet the power of persuasion, but the
union of elegance and power together with virtue. One who studied
language and rhetoric in the tradition of the great orators of antiquity
did so for a moral purpose—to persuade men and women to the good
life—for, said Petrarch in a dictum that could stand as the slogan of
Renaissance humanism, “it is better to will the good than to know the
truth.”
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Italian humanism » The
humanities
To will the good, one must first know it, and so there could be no true
eloquence without wisdom. According to Leonardo Bruni, a leading
humanist of the next generation, Petrarch “opened the way for us to show
in what manner we might acquire learning.” Petrarch’s union of rhetoric
and philosophy, modeled on the classical ideal of eloquence, provided
the humanists with an intellectual dignity and a moral ethos lacking to
the medieval dictatores and classicists. It also pointed the way toward
a program of studies—the studia humanitatis—by which the ideal might be
achieved. As elaborated by Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and others, the
notion of the humanities was based on classical models—the tradition of
a liberal arts curriculum conceived by the Greeks and elaborated by
Cicero and Quintilian. Medieval scholars had been fascinated by the
notion that there were seven liberal arts, no more and no less, although
they did not always agree as to which they were. The humanists had their
own favourites, which invariably included grammar, rhetoric, poetry,
moral philosophy, and history, with a nod or two toward music and
mathematics. They also had their own ideas about methods of teaching and
study. They insisted upon the mastery of Classical Latin and, where
possible, Greek, which began to be studied again in the West in 1397,
when the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to lecture in
Florence. They also insisted upon the study of classical authors at
first hand, banishing the medieval textbooks and compendiums from their
schools. This greatly increased the demand for classical texts, which
was first met by copying manuscript books in the newly developed
humanistic scripts and then, after the mid-15th century, by the method
of printing with movable type, first developed in Germany and rapidly
adopted in Italy and elsewhere. Thus, while it is true that most of the
ancient authors were already known in the Middle Ages, there was an
all-important difference between circulating a book in many copies to a
reading public and jealously guarding a single exemplar as a prized
possession in some remote monastery library.
The term humanist (Italian umanista, Latin humanista) first occurs in
15th-century documents to refer to a teacher of the humanities.
Humanists taught in a variety of ways. Some founded their own schools—as
Vittorino da Feltre did in Mantua in 1423 and Guarino Veronese in
Ferrara in 1429—where students could study the new curriculum at both
elementary and advanced levels. Some humanists taught in universities,
which, while remaining strongholds of specialization in law, medicine,
and theology, had begun to make a place for the new disciplines by the
late 14th century. Still others were employed in private households, as
was the poet and scholar Politian (Angelo Poliziano), who was tutor to
the Medici children as well as a university professor.
Formal education was only one of several ways in which the humanists
shaped the minds of their age. Many were themselves fine literary
artists who exemplified the eloquence they were trying to foster in
their students. Renaissance Latin poetry, for example, nowadays
dismissed—usually unread—as imitative and formalistic, contains much
graceful and lyrical expression by such humanists as Politian, Giovanni
Pontano, and Jacopo Sannazzaro. In drama, Politian, Pontano, and Pietro
Bembo were important innovators, and the humanists were in their element
in the composition of elegant letters, dialogues, and discourses. By the
late 15th century, humanists were beginning to apply their ideas about
language and literature to composition in Italian as well as in Latin,
demonstrating that the “vulgar” tongue could be as supple and as elegant
in poetry and prose as was Classical Latin.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Italian humanism »
Classical scholarship
Not every humanist was a poet, but most were classical scholars.
Classical scholarship consisted of a set of related, specialized
techniques by which the cultural heritage of antiquity was made
available for convenient use. Essentially, in addition to searching out
and authenticating ancient authors and works, this meant
editing—comparing variant manuscripts of a work, correcting faulty or
doubtful passages, and commenting in notes or in separate treatises on
the style, meaning, and context of an author’s thought. Obviously, this
demanded not only superb mastery of the languages involved and a command
of classical literature but also a knowledge of the culture that formed
the ancient author’s mind and influenced his writing. Consequently, the
humanists created a vast scholarly literature devoted to these matters
and instructive in the critical techniques of classical philology, the
study of ancient texts.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Italian humanism » Arts
and letters
Classicism and the literary impulse went hand in hand. From Lovato
Lovati and Albertino Mussato to Politian and Pontano, humanists wrote
Latin poetry and drama with considerable grace and power (Politian wrote
in Greek as well), while others composed epistles, essays, dialogues,
treatises, and histories on classical models. In fact, it is fair to say
that the development of elegant prose was the major literary achievement
of humanism and that the epistle was its typical form. Petrarch’s
practice of collecting, reordering, and even rewriting his letters—of
treating them as works of art—was widely imitated.
For lengthier discussions, the humanist was likely to compose a
formal treatise or a dialogue—a classical form that provided the
opportunity to combine literary imagination with the discussion of
weighty matters. The most famous example of this type is The Courtier,
published by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528; a graceful discussion of
love, courtly manners, and the ideal education for a perfect gentleman,
it had enormous influence throughout Europe. Castiglione had a humanist
education, but he wrote The Courtier in Italian, the language Bembo
chose for his dialogue on love, Gli Asolani (1505), and Ludovico Ariosto
chose for his delightful epic, Orlando furioso, completed in 1516. The
vernacular was coming of age as a literary medium.
According to some, a life-and-death struggle between Latin and
Italian began in the 14th century, while the mortal enemies of Italian
were the humanists, who impeded the natural growth of the vernacular
after its brilliant beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In
this view, the choice of Italian by such great 16th-century writers as
Castiglione, Ariosto, and Machiavelli represents the final “triumph” of
the vernacular and the restoration of contact between Renaissance
culture and its native roots. The reality is somewhat less dramatic and
more complicated. Most Italian writers regarded Latin as being as much a
part of their culture as the vernacular, and most of them wrote in both
languages. It should also be remembered that Italy was a land of
powerful regional dialect traditions; until the late 13th century, Latin
was the only language common to all Italians. By the end of that
century, however, Tuscan was emerging as the primary vernacular, and
Dante’s choice of it for his The Divine Comedy ensured its preeminence.
Of lyric poets writing in Tuscan (hereafter called Italian), the
greatest was Petrarch. His canzoni, or songs, and sonnets in praise of
Laura are revealing studies of the effect of love upon the lover; his
Italia mia is a plea for peace that evokes the beauties of his native
land; his religious songs reveal his deep spiritual feeling.
Petrarch’s friend and admirer Giovanni Boccaccio is best known for
his Decameron; but he pioneered in adapting classical forms to Italian
usage, including the hunting poem, romance, idyll, and pastoral, whereas
some of his themes, most notably the story of Troilus and Cressida, were
borrowed by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer and Torquato Tasso.
The scarcity of first-rate Italian poetry throughout most of the 15th
century has caused a number of historians to regret the passing of il
buon secolo, the great age of the language, which supposedly came to an
end with the ascendancy of humanist classicism. For every humanist who
disdained the vernacular, however, there was a Leonardo Bruni to
maintain its excellence or a Poggio Bracciolini to prove it in his own
Italian writings. Indeed, there was an absence of first-rate Latin poets
until the late 15th century, which suggests a general lack of poetic
creativity in this period and not of Italian poetry alone. It may be
that both Italian and Latin poets needed time to absorb and assimilate
the various new tendencies of the preceding period. Tuscan was as much a
new language for many as was Classical Latin, and there was a variety of
literary forms to be mastered.
With Lorenzo de’ Medici the period of tutelage came to an end. The
Magnificent Lorenzo, virtual ruler of Florence in the late 15th century,
was one of the fine poets of his time. His sonnets show Petrarch’s
influence, but transformed with his own genius. His poetry epitomizes
the Renaissance ideal of l’uomo universale, the many-sided man. Love of
nature, love of women, love of life are the principal themes. The
woodland settings and hunting scenes of Lorenzo’s poems suggest how he
found relief from a busy public life; his love songs to his mistresses
and his bawdy carnival ballads show the other face of a devoted father
and affectionate husband. The celebration of youth in his most famous
poem was etched with the sad realization of the brevity of life. His own
ended at the age of 43.
Oh, how fair is youth, and yet how fleeting! Let yourself be joyous
if you feel it: Of tomorrow there is no certainty—
Florence was only one centre of the flowering of the vernacular.
Ferrara saw literature and art flourish under the patronage of the
ruling Este family and before the end of the 15th century counted at
least one major poet, Matteo Boiardo, author of the Orlando innamorato,
an epic of Roland. A blending of the Arthurian and Carolingian epic
traditions, Boiardo’s Orlando inspired Ludovico Ariosto to take up the
same themes. The result was the finest of all Italian epics, Orlando
furioso. The ability of the medieval epic and folk traditions to inspire
the poets of such sophisticated centres as Florence and Ferrara suggests
that, humanist disdain for the Dark Ages notwithstanding, Renaissance
Italians did not allow classicism to cut them off from their medieval
roots.
The Renaissance » The Italian Renaissance » Renaissance thought
While the humanists were not primarily philosophers and belonged to no
single school of formal thought, they had a great deal of influence upon
philosophy. They searched out and copied the works of ancient authors,
developed critical tools for establishing accurate texts from variant
manuscripts, made translations from Latin and Greek, and wrote
commentaries that reflected their broad learning and their new standards
and points of view. Aristotle’s authority remained preeminent,
especially in logic and physics, but humanists were instrumental in the
revival of other Greek scientists and other ancient philosophies,
including stoicism, skepticism, and various forms of Platonism, as, for
example, the eclectic Neoplatonist and Gnostic doctrines of the
Alexandrian schools known as Hermetic philosophy. All of these were to
have far-reaching effects on the subsequent development of European
thought. While humanists had a variety of intellectual and scholarly
aims, it is fair to say that, like the ancient Romans, they preferred
moral philosophy to metaphysics. Their faith in the moral benefits of
poetry and rhetoric inspired generations of scholars and educators.
Their emphasis upon eloquence, worldly achievement, and fame brought
them readers and patrons among merchants and princes and employment in
government chancelleries and embassies.
Humanists were secularists in the sense that language, literature,
politics, and history, rather than “sacred subjects,” were their central
interests. They defended themselves against charges from conservatives
that their preference for classical authors was ruining Christian morals
and faith, arguing that a solid grounding in the classics was the best
preparation for the Christian life. This was already a perennial debate,
almost as old as Christianity itself, with neither side able to prove
its case. There seems to have been little atheism or dechristianization
among the humanists or their pupils, although there were efforts to
redefine the relationship between religious and secular culture.
Petrarch struggled with the problem in his book Secretum meum (1342–43,
revised 1353–58), in which he imagines himself chastized by St.
Augustine for his pursuit of worldly fame. Even the most celebrated of
Renaissance themes, the “dignity of man,” best known in the Oration
(1486) of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was derived in part from the
Church Fathers. Created in the image and likeness of God, people were
free to shape their destiny, but human destiny was defined within a
Christian, Neoplatonic context of contemplative thought.
You will have the power to sink to the lower forms of life, which are
brutish. You will have the power, through your own judgment, to be
reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.
Perhaps because Italian politics were so intense and innovative, the
tension between traditional Christian teachings and actual behaviour was
more frankly acknowledged in political thought than in most other
fields. The leading spokesman of the new approach to politics was
Niccolò Machiavelli. Best known as the author of The Prince (1513), a
short treatise on how to acquire power, create a state, and keep it,
Machiavelli dared to argue that success in politics had its own rules.
This so shocked his readers that they coined his name into synonyms for
the Devil (“Old Nick”) and for crafty, unscrupulous tactics
(Machiavellian). No other name, except perhaps that of the Borgias, so
readily evokes the image of the wicked Renaissance, and, indeed, Cesare
Borgia was one of Machiavelli’s chief models for The Prince.
Machiavelli began with the not unchristian axiom that people are
immoderate in their ambitions and desires and likely to oppress each
other whenever free to do so. To get them to limit their selfishness and
act for the common good should be the lofty, almost holy, purpose of
governments. How to establish and maintain governments that do this was
the central problem of politics, made acute for Machiavelli by the twin
disasters of his time, the decline of free government in the city-states
and the overrunning of Italy by French, German, and Spanish armies. In
The Prince he advocated his emergency solution: Italy needed a new
leader, who would unify the people, drive out “the barbarians,” and
reestablish civic virtue. But in the Discourses on the First Ten Books
of Livy (1517), a more detached and extended discussion, he analyzed the
foundations and practice of republican government, still trying to
explain how stubborn and defective human material was transformed into
political community.
Machiavelli was influenced by humanist culture in many ways,
including his reverence for classical antiquity, his concern with
politics, and his effort to evaluate the impact of fortune as against
free choice in human life. The “new path” in politics that he announced
in The Prince was an effort to provide a guide for political action
based on the lessons of history and his own experience as a foreign
secretary in Florence. In his passionate republicanism he showed himself
to be the heir of the great humanists of a century earlier who had
expounded the ideals of free citizenship and explored the uses of
classicism for the public life.
At the beginning of the 15th century, when the Visconti rulers of
Milan were threatening to overrun Florence, the humanist chancellor
Coluccio Salutati had rallied the Florentines by reminding them that
their city was “the daughter of Rome” and the legatee of Roman justice
and liberty. Salutati’s pupil, Leonardo Bruni, who also served as
chancellor, took up this line in his panegyrics of Florence and in his
Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (“Twelve Books of Histories of
the Florentine People”). Even before the rise of Rome, according to
Bruni, the Etruscans had founded free cities in Tuscany, so the roots of
Florentine liberty went very deep. There equality was recognized in
justice and opportunity for all citizens, and the claims of individual
excellence were rewarded in public offices and public honours. This
close relation between freedom and achievement, argued Bruni, explained
Florence’s superiority in culture as well as in politics. Florence was
the home of Italy’s greatest poets, the pioneer in both vernacular and
Latin literature, and the seat of the Greek revival and of eloquence. In
short, Florence was the centre of the studia humanitatis.
As political rhetoric, Bruni’s version of Florentine superiority was
magnificent and no doubt effective. It inspired the Florentines to hold
out against Milanese aggression and to reshape their identity as the
seat of “the rebirth of letters” and the champions of freedom; but, as a
theory of political culture, this “civic humanism,” as Hans Baron has
called it, represented the ideal rather than the reality of 15th-century
communal history. Even in Florence, where after 1434 the Medici family
held a grip on the city’s republican government, opportunities for the
active life began to fade. The emphasis in thought began to shift from
civic humanism to Neoplatonist idealism and to the kind of utopian
mysticism represented by Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. At the
end of the century, Florentines briefly put themselves into the hands of
the millennialist Dominican preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who
envisioned the city as the “New Jerusalem” rather than as a
reincarnation of ancient Rome. Still, even Savonarola borrowed from the
civic tradition of the humanists for his political reforms (and for his
idea of Florentine superiority) and in so doing created a bridge between
the republican past and the crisis years of the early 16th century.
Machiavelli got his first job in the Florentine chancellery in 1498, the
year of Savonarola’s fall from power. Dismissing the friar as one of
history’s “unarmed prophets” who are bound to fail, Machiavelli was
convinced that the precepts of Christianity had helped make the Italian
states sluggish and weak. He regarded religion as an indispensable
component of human life, but statecraft as a discipline based on its own
rules and no more to be subordinated to Christianity than were
jurisprudence or medicine. The simplest example of the difference
between Christian and political morality is provided by warfare, where
the use of deception, so detestable in every other kind of action, is
necessary, praiseworthy, even glorious. In the Discourses, Machiavelli
commented upon a Roman defeat:
This is worth noting by every citizen who is called upon to give
counsel to his country, for when the very safety of the country is at
stake there should be no question of justice or injustice, of mercy or
cruelty, of honour or disgrace, but putting every other consideration
aside, that course should be followed which will save her life and
liberty.
Machiavelli’s own country was Florence; when he wrote that he loved
his country more than he loved his soul, he was consciously forsaking
Christian ethics for the morality of civic virtue. His friend and
countryman Francesco Guicciardini shared his political morality and his
concern for politics but lacked his faith that a knowledge of ancient
political wisdom would redeem the liberty of Italy. Guicciardini was an
upper-class Florentine who chose a career in public administration and
devoted his leisure to writing history and reflecting on politics. He
was steeped in the humanist traditions of Florence and was a dedicated
republican, notwithstanding the fact—or perhaps because of it—that he
spent his entire career in the service of the Medici and rose to high
positions under them. But Guicciardini, more skeptical and aristocratic
than Machiavelli, was also half a generation younger, and he was
schooled in an age that was already witnessing the decline of Italian
autonomy.
In 1527 Florence revolted against the Medici a second time and
established a republic. As a confidant of the Medici, Guicciardini was
passed over for public office and retired to his estate. One of the
fruits of this enforced leisure was the so-called Cose fiorentine
(Florentine Affairs), an unfinished manuscript on Florentine history.
While it generally follows the classic form of humanist civic history,
the fragment contains some significant departures from this tradition.
No longer is the history of the city treated in isolation; Guicciardini
was becoming aware that the political fortunes of Florence were
interwoven with those of Italy as a whole and that the French invasion
of Italy in 1494 was a turning point in Italian history. He returned to
public life with the restoration of the Medici in 1530 and was involved
in the events leading to the tightening of the imperial grip upon Italy,
the humbling of the Papacy, and the final transformation of the republic
of Florence into a hereditary Medici dukedom. Frustrated in his efforts
to influence the rulers of Florence, he again retired to his villa to
write; but, instead of taking up the unfinished manuscript on Florentine
history, he chose a subject commensurate with his changed perspective on
Italian affairs. The result was his History of Italy. Though still in
the humanist form and style, it was in substance a fulfillment of the
new tendencies already evident in the earlier work—criticism of sources,
great attention to detail, avoidance of moral generalizations, shrewd
analysis of character and motive.
The History of Italy has rightly been called a tragedy by the
American historian Felix Gilbert, for it demonstrates how, out of
stupidity and weakness, people make mistakes that gradually narrow the
range of their freedom to choose alternative courses and thus to
influence events until, finally, they are trapped in the web of fortune.
This view of history was already far from the world of Machiavelli, not
to mention that of the civic humanists. Where Machiavelli believed that
virtù—bold and intelligent initiative—could shape, if not totally
control, fortuna—the play of external forces—Guicciardini was skeptical
about men’s ability to learn from the past and pessimistic about the
individual’s power to shape the course of events. All that was left, he
believed, was to understand. Guicciardini wrote his histories of
Florence and of Italy to show what people were like and to explain how
they had reached their present circumstances. Human dignity, then,
consisted not in the exercise of will to shape destiny but in the use of
reason to contemplate and perhaps to tolerate fate. In taking a new,
hard look at the human condition, Guicciardini represents the decline of
humanist optimism.
The Renaissance » The northern Renaissance » Political, economic, and
social background
In 1494 King Charles VIII of France led an army southward over the Alps,
seeking the Neapolitan crown and glory. Many believed that this barely
literate gnome of a man, hunched over his horse, was the Second
Charlemagne, whose coming had been long predicted by French and Italian
prophets. Apparently, Charles himself believed this; it is recorded
that, when he was chastised by Savonarola for delaying his divine
mission of reform and crusade in Florence, the king burst into tears and
soon went on his way. He found the Kingdom of Naples easy to take and
impossible to hold; frightened by local uprisings, by a new Italian
coalition, and by the massing of Spanish troops in Sicily, he left
Naples in the spring of 1495, bound not for the Holy Land, as the
prophecies had predicted, but for home, never to return to Italy. In
1498 Savonarola was tortured, hanged, and burned as a false prophet for
predicting that Charles would complete his mission. Conceived amid
dreams of chivalric glory and crusade, the Italian expedition of Charles
VIII was the venture of a medieval king—romantic, poorly planned, and
totally irrelevant to the real needs of his subjects.
The French invasion of Italy marked the beginning of a new phase of
European politics, during which the Valois kings of France and the
Habsburgs of Germany fought each other, with the Italian states as their
reluctant pawns. For the next 60 years the dream of Italian conquest was
pursued by every French king, none of them having learned anything from
Charles VIII’s misadventure except that the road southward was open and
paved with easy victories. For even longer Italy would be the keystone
of the arch that the Habsburgs tried to erect across Europe from the
Danube to the Strait of Gibraltar in order to link the Spanish and
German inheritance of the emperor Charles V. In destroying the autonomy
of Italian politics, the invasions also ended the Italian state system,
which was absorbed into the larger European system that now took shape.
Its members adopted the balance-of-power diplomacy first evolved by the
Italians as well as the Italian practice of using resident ambassadors
who combined diplomacy with the gathering of intelligence by fair means
or foul. In the art of war, also, the Italians were innovators in the
use of mercenary troops, cannonry, bastioned fortresses, and field
fortification. French artillery was already the best in Europe by 1494,
whereas the Spaniards developed the tercio, an infantry unit that
combined the most effective field fortifications and weaponry of the
Italians and Swiss.
Thus, old and new ways were fused in the bloody crucible of the
Italian Wars. Rulers who lived by medieval codes of chivalry adopted
Renaissance techniques of diplomacy and warfare to satisfy their lust
for glory and dynastic power. Even the lure of Italy was an old
obsession; but the size and vigour of the 16th-century expeditions were
new. Rulers were now able to command vast quantities of men and
resources because they were becoming masters of their own domains. The
nature and degree of this mastery varied according to local
circumstances; but throughout Europe the New Monarchs, as they are
called, were reasserting kingship as the dominant form of political
leadership after a long period of floundering and uncertainty.
By the end of the 15th century, the Valois kings of France had
expelled the English from all their soil except the port of Calais,
concluding the Hundred Years’ War (1453), had incorporated the fertile
lands of the duchy of Burgundy to the east and of Brittany to the north,
and had extended the French kingdom from the Atlantic and the English
Channel to the Pyrenees and the Rhine. To rule this vast territory, they
created a professional machinery of state, converting wartime taxing
privileges into permanent prerogative, freeing their royal council from
supervision by the Estates-General, appointing a host of officials who
crisscrossed the kingdom in the service of the crown, and establishing
their right to appoint and tax the French clergy. They did not achieve
anything like complete centralization; but in 1576 Jean Bodin was able
to write, in his Six Books of the Commonweal, that the king of France
had absolute sovereignty because he alone in the kingdom had the power
to give law unto all of his subjects in general and to every one of them
in particular.
Bodin might also have made his case by citing the example of another
impressive autocrat of his time, Philip II of Spain. Though descended
from warrior kings, Philip spent his days at his writing desk poring
over dispatches from his governors in the Low Countries, Sicily, Naples,
Milan, Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines and drafting his orders to them
in letters signed “I the King.” The founding of this mighty empire went
back more than a century to 1469, when Ferdinand II of Aragon and
Isabella of Castile brought two great Hispanic kingdoms together under a
single dynasty. Castile, an arid land of sheepherders, great landowning
churchmen, and crusading knights, and Aragon, with its Catalan miners
and its strong ties to Mediterranean Europe, made uneasy partners; but a
series of rapid and energetic actions forced the process of national
consolidation and catapulted the new nation into a position of world
prominence for which it was poorly prepared. Within the last decade of
the 15th century, the Spaniards took the kingdom of Navarre in the
north; stormed the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, the kingdom of
Granada; and launched a campaign of religious unification by pressing
tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews to choose between baptism and
expulsion, at the same time establishing a new Inquisition under royal
control. They also sent Columbus on voyages of discovery to the Western
Hemisphere, thereby opening a new frontier just as the domestic frontier
of reconquest was closing. Finally, the crown linked its destinies with
the Habsburgs by a double marriage, thus projecting Spain into the heart
of European politics. In the following decades, Castilian hidalgos
(lower nobles), whose fathers had crusaded against the Moors in Spain,
streamed across the Atlantic to make their fortunes out of the land and
sweat of the American Indians, while others marched in the armies and
sailed in the ships of their king, Charles I, who, as Charles V, was
elected Holy Roman emperor in 1519 at the age of 19. In this youth, the
vast dual inheritance of the Spanish and Habsburg empires came together.
The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella on his mother’s side and of the
emperor Maximilian I on his father’s, Charles was duke of Burgundy, head
of five Austrian dukedoms (which he ceded to his brother), king of
Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and claimant to the duchy of Milan as well
as king of Aragon and Castile and German king and emperor. To administer
this enormous legacy, he presided over an ever-increasing bureaucracy of
viceroys, governors, judges, military captains, and an army of clerks.
The New World lands were governed by a separate Council of the Indies
after 1524, which, like Charles’ other royal councils, combined
judicial, legislative, military, and fiscal functions.
The yield in American treasure was enormous, especially after the
opening of the silver mines of Mexico and what is now Bolivia halfway
through the 16th century. The crown skimmed off a lion’s share—usually a
fifth—which it paid out immediately to its creditors because everything
Charles could raise by taxing or borrowing was sucked up by his wars
against the French in Italy and Burgundy, the Protestant princes in
Germany, the Turks on the Austrian border, and the Barbary pirates in
the Mediterranean. By 1555 both Charles and his credit were exhausted,
and he began to relinquish his titles—Spain and the Netherlands to his
son Philip, Germany and the imperial title to his brother Ferdinand I.
American silver did little for Spain except to pay the wages of soldiers
and sailors; the goods and services that kept the Spanish armies in the
field and the ships afloat were largely supplied by foreigners, who
reaped the profits. Yet, for the rest of the century, Spain continued to
dazzle the world, and few could see the chinks in the armour; this was
an age of kings, in which bold deeds, not balance sheets, made history.
The growth of centralized monarchy claiming absolute sovereignty over
its subjects may be observed in other places, from the England of Henry
VIII on the extreme west of Europe to the Muscovite tsardom of Ivan III
the Great on its eastern edge, for the New Monarchy was one aspect of a
more general phenomenon—a great recovery that surged through Europe in
the 15th century. No single cause can be adduced to explain it. Some
historians believe it was simply the upturn in the natural cycle of
growth: the great medieval population boom had overextended Europe’s
productive capacities; the depression of the 14th and early 15th
centuries had corrected this condition through famines and epidemics,
leading to depopulation; now the cycle of growth was beginning again.
Once more, growing numbers of people, burgeoning cities, and
ambitious governments were demanding food, goods, and services—a demand
that was met by both old and new methods of production. In agriculture,
the shift toward commercial crops such as wool and grains, the
investment of capital, and the emancipation of servile labour completed
the transformation of the manorial system already in decline. (In
eastern Europe, however, the formerly free peasantry was now forced into
serfdom by an alliance between the monarchy and the landed gentry, as
huge agrarian estates were formed to raise grain for an expanding
Western market.) Manufacturing boomed, especially of those goods used in
the outfitting of armies and fleets—cloth, armour, weapons, and ships.
New mining and metalworking technology made possible the profitable
exploitation of the rich iron, copper, gold, and silver deposits of
central Germany, Hungary, and Austria, affording the opportunity for
large-scale investment of capital.
One index of Europe’s recovery is the spectacular growth of certain
cities. Antwerp, for example, more than doubled its population in the
second half of the 15th century and doubled it again by 1560. Under
Habsburg patronage, Antwerp became the chief European entrepôt for
English cloth, the hub of an international banking network, and the
principal Western market for German copper and silver, Portuguese
spices, and Italian alum. By 1500 the Antwerp Bourse was the central
money market for much of Europe. Other cities profited from their
special circumstances, too: Lisbon as the home port for the Portuguese
maritime empire; Sevilla (Seville), the Spaniards’ gateway to the New
World; London, the capital of the Tudors and gathering point for
England’s cloth-making and banking activity; Lyon, favoured by the
French kings as a market centre and capital of the silk industry; and
Augsburg, the principal north-south trade route in Germany and the home
city of the Fugger merchant-bankers. (For further discussion, see below
The emergence of modern Europe: Economy and society.)
The Renaissance » The northern Renaissance » Northern humanism
Cities were also markets for culture. The resumption of urban growth in
the second half of the 15th century coincided with the diffusion of
Renaissance ideas and educational values. Humanism offered linguistic
and rhetorical skills that were becoming indispensable for nobles and
commoners seeking careers in diplomacy and government administration,
while the Renaissance ideal of the perfect gentleman was a cultural
style that had great appeal in this age of growing courtly refinement.
At first many who wanted a humanist education went to Italy, and many
foreign names appear on the rosters of the Italian universities. By the
end of the century, however, such northern cities as London, Paris,
Antwerp, and Augsburg were becoming centres of humanist activity
rivaling Italy’s. The development of printing, by making books cheaper
and more plentiful, also quickened the diffusion of humanism.
A textbook convention, heavily armoured against truth by constant
reiteration, states that northern humanism—i.e., humanism outside
Italy—was essentially Christian in spirit and purpose, in contrast to
the essentially secular nature of Italian humanism. In fact, however,
the program of Christian humanism had been laid out by Italian humanists
of the stamp of Lorenzo Valla, one of the founders of classical
philology, who showed how the critical methods used to study the
classics ought to be applied to problems of biblical exegesis and
translation as well as church history. That this program only began to
be carried out in the 16th century, particularly in the countries of
northern Europe (and Spain), is a matter of chronology rather than of
geography. In the 15th century, the necessary skills, particularly the
knowledge of Greek, were possessed by a few scholars; a century later,
Greek was a regular part of the humanist curriculum, and Hebrew was
becoming much better known, particularly after Johannes Reuchlin
published his Hebrew grammar in 1506. Here, too, printing was a crucial
factor, for it made available a host of lexicographical and grammatical
handbooks and allowed the establishment of normative biblical texts and
the comparison of different versions of the Bible.
Christian humanism was more than a program of scholarship, however;
it was fundamentally a conception of the Christian life that was
grounded in the rhetorical, historical, and ethical orientation of
humanism itself. That it came to the fore in the early 16th century was
the result of a variety of factors, including the spiritual stresses of
rapid social change and the inability of the ecclesiastical
establishment to cope with the religious needs of an increasingly
literate and self-confident laity. By restoring the gospel to the centre
of Christian piety, the humanists believed they were better serving the
needs of ordinary people. They attacked scholastic theology as an arid
intellectualization of simple faith, and they deplored the tendency of
religion to become a ritual practiced vicariously through a priest. They
also despised the whole late-medieval apparatus of relic mongering,
hagiology, indulgences, and image worship, and they ridiculed it in
their writings, sometimes with devastating effect. According to the
Christian humanists, the fundamental law of Christianity was the law of
love as revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospel. Love, peace, and
simplicity should be the aims of the good Christian, and the life of
Christ his perfect model. The chief spokesman for this point of view was
Desiderius Erasmus, the most influential humanist of his day. Erasmus
and his colleagues were uninterested in dogmatic differences and were
early champions of religious toleration. In this they were not in tune
with the changing times, for the outbreak of the Reformation polarized
European society along confessional lines, with the paradoxical result
that the Christian humanists, who had done so much to lay the groundwork
for religious reform, ended by being suspect on both sides—by the Roman
Catholics as subversives who (as it was said of Erasmus) had “laid the
egg that Luther hatched” and by the Protestants as hypocrites who had
abandoned the cause of reformation out of cowardice or ambition.
Toleration belonged to the future, after the killing in the name of
Christ sickened and passions had cooled.
The Renaissance » The northern Renaissance » Christian mystics
The quickening of the religious impulse that gave rise to Christian
humanism was also manifested in a variety of forms of religious devotion
among the laity, including mysticism. In the 14th century a wave of
mystical ardour seemed to course down the valley of the Rhine,
enveloping men and women in the rapture of intense, direct experience of
the divine Spirit. It centred in the houses of the Dominican order,
where friars and nuns practiced the mystical way of their great teacher,
Meister Eckhart. This wave of Rhenish mysticism radiated beyond convent
walls to the marketplaces and hearths of the laity. Eckhart had the gift
of making his abstruse doctrines understandable to a wider public than
was usual for mystics; moreover, he was fortunate in having some
disciples of a genius almost equal to his own—the great preacher of
practical piety, Johann Tauler, and Heinrich Suso, whose devotional
books, such as The Little Book of Truth and The Little Book of Eternal
Wisdom, reached eager lay readers hungry for spiritual consolation and
religious excitement. Some found it by joining the Dominicans; others,
remaining in the everyday world, joined with like-spirited brothers and
sisters in groups known collectively as the Friends of God, where they
practiced methodical contemplation, or, as it was widely known, mental
prayer. Probably few reached, or even hoped to reach, the ecstasy of
mystical union, which was limited to those with the appropriate
psychological or spiritual gifts. Out of these circles came the
anonymous German Theology, from which, Luther was to say, he had learned
more about man and God than from any book except the Bible and the
writings of St. Augustine.
In the Netherlands the mystical impulse awakened chiefly under the
stimulus of another great teacher, Gerhard Groote. Not a monk nor even a
priest, Groote gave the mystical movement a different direction by
teaching that true spiritual communion must be combined with moral
action, for this was the whole lesson of the Gospel. At his death a
group of followers formed the Brethren of the Common Life. These were
laymen and laywomen, married and single, earning their livings in the
world but united by a simple rule that required them to pool their
earnings and devote themselves to spiritual works, teaching, and
charity. Houses of Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life spread
through the cities and towns of the Netherlands and Germany, and a
monastic counterpart was founded in the order of Canons Regular of St.
Augustine, known as the Windesheim Congregation, which in the second
half of the 15th century numbered some 82 priories. The Brethren were
particularly successful as schoolmasters, combining some of the new
linguistic methods of the humanists with a strong emphasis upon Bible
study. Among the generations of children who absorbed the new piety
(devotio moderna) in their schools were Erasmus and, briefly, Luther. In
the ambience of the devotio moderna appeared one of the most influential
books of piety ever written, The Imitation of Christ, attributed to
Thomas à Kempis, a monk of the Windesheim Congregation.
One man whose life was changed by The Imitation was the 16th-century
Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola. After reading it, Loyola founded the
Society of Jesus and wrote his own book of methodical prayer, Spiritual
Exercises. Thus, Spanish piety was in some ways connected with that of
the Netherlands; but the extraordinary outburst of mystical and
contemplative activity in 16th-century Spain was mainly an expression of
the intense religious exaltation of the Spanish people themselves as
they confronted the tasks of reform, Counter-Reformation, and world
leadership. Spanish mysticism belies the usual picture of the mystic as
a withdrawn contemplative, with his or her head in the clouds. Not only
Loyola but also St. Teresa of Avila and her disciple, St. John of the
Cross, were tough, activist Reformers who regarded their mystical
experiences as means of fortifying themselves for their practical tasks.
They were also prolific writers who could communicate their experiences
and analyze them for the benefit of others. This is especially true of
St. John of the Cross, whose mystical poetry is one of the glories of
Spanish literature.
The Renaissance » The northern Renaissance » The growth of vernacular
literature
In literature, medieval forms continued to dominate the artistic
imagination throughout the 15th century. Besides the vast devotional
literature of the period—the ars moriendi, or books on the art of dying
well, the saints’ lives, and manuals of methodical prayer and spiritual
consolation—the most popular reading of noble and burgher alike was a
13th-century love allegory, the Roman de le rose. Despite a promising
start in the late Middle Ages, literary creativity suffered from the
domination of Latin as the language of “serious” expression, with the
result that, if the vernacular attracted writers, they tended to
overload it with Latinisms and artificially applied rhetorical forms.
This was the case with the so-called grande rhetoriqueurs of Burgundy
and France. One exception is 14th-century England, where a national
literature made a brilliant showing in the works of William Langland,
John Gower, and, above all, Geoffrey Chaucer. The troubled 15th century,
however, produced only feeble imitations. Another exception is the
vigorous tradition of chronicle writing in French, distinguished by such
eminently readable works as the chronicle of Jean Froissart and the
memoirs of Philippe de Commynes. In France, too, about the middle of the
15th century there lived the vagabond François Villon, a great poet
about whom next to nothing is known. In Germany The Ship of Fools, by
Sebastian Brant, was a lone masterpiece.
The 16th century saw a true renaissance of national literatures. In
Protestant countries, the Reformation had an enormous impact upon the
quantity and quality of literary output. If Luther’s rebellion destroyed
the chances of unifying the nation politically—because religious
division exacerbated political division and made Lutherans intolerant of
the Catholic Habsburgs—his translation of the Bible into German created
a national language. Biblical translations, vernacular liturgies, hymns,
and sacred drama had analogous effects elsewhere. For Roman Catholics,
especially in Spain, the Reformation was a time of deep religious
emotion expressed in art and literature. On all sides of the religious
controversy, chroniclers and historians writing in the vernacular were
recording their versions for posterity.
While the Reformation was providing a subject matter, the Italian
Renaissance was providing literary methods and models. The Petrarchan
sonnet inspired French, English, and Spanish poets, while the
Renaissance neoclassical drama finally began to end the reign of the
medieval mystery play. Ultimately, of course, the works of real genius
were the result of a crossing of native traditions and new forms. The
Frenchman François Rabelais assimilated all the themes of his day—and
mocked them all—in his story of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. The
Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote, drew a composite portrait
of his countrymen, which caught their exact mixture of idealism and
realism. In England, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare used
Renaissance drama to probe the deeper levels of their countrymen’s
character and experiences.
The Renaissance » Renaissance science and technology
According to medieval scientists, matter was composed of four
elements—earth, air, fire, and water—whose combinations and permutations
made up the world of visible objects. The cosmos was a series of
concentric spheres in motion, the farther ones carrying the stars around
in their daily courses. At the centre was the globe of Earth, heavy and
static. Motion was either perfectly circular, as in the heavens, or
irregular and naturally downward, as on Earth. The Earth had three
landmasses—Europe, Asia, and Africa—and was unknown and uninhabitable in
its southern zones. Human beings, the object of all creation, were
composed of four humours—black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—and
the body’s health was determined by the relative proportions of each.
The cosmos was alive with a universal consciousness with which people
could interact in various ways, and the heavenly bodies were generally
believed to influence human character and events, although theologians
worried about free will.
These views were an amalgam of classical and Christian thought and,
from what can be inferred from written sources, shaped the way educated
people experienced and interpreted phenomena. What people who did not
read or write books understood about nature is more difficult to tell,
except that belief in magic, good and evil spirits, witchcraft, and
forecasting the future was universal. The church might prefer that
Christians seek their well-being through faith, the sacraments, and the
intercession of Mary and the saints, but distinctions between acceptable
and unacceptable belief in hidden powers were difficult to make or to
maintain. Most clergy shared the common beliefs in occult forces and
lent their authority to them. The collaboration of formal doctrine and
popular belief had some of its most terrible consequences during the
Renaissance, such as pogroms against Jews and witch-hunts, in which the
church provided the doctrines of Satanic conspiracy and the
inquisitorial agents and popular prejudice supplied the victims,
predominantly women and marginal people.
Among the formally educated, if not among the general population,
traditional science was transformed by the new heliocentric,
mechanistic, and mathematical conceptions of Copernicus, Harvey, Kepler,
Galileo, and Newton. Historians of science are increasingly reluctant to
describe these changes as a revolution, since this implies too sudden
and complete an overthrow of the earlier model. Aristotle’s authority
gave way very slowly, and only the first of the great scientists
mentioned above did his work in the period under consideration. Still,
the Renaissance made some important contributions toward the process of
paradigm shift, as the 20th-century historian of science Thomas Kuhn
called major innovations in science. Humanist scholarship provided both
originals and translations of ancient Greek scientific works—which
enormously increased the fund of knowledge in physics, astronomy,
medicine, botany, and other disciplines—and presented as well
alternative theories to those of Ptolemy and Aristotle. Thus, the
revival of ancient science brought heliocentric astronomy to the fore
again after almost two millennia. Renaissance philosophers, most notably
Jacopo Zabarella, analyzed and formulated the rules of the deductive and
inductive methods by which scientists worked, while certain ancient
philosophies enriched the ways in which scientists conceived of
phenomena. Pythagoreanism, for example, conveyed a vision of a
harmonious geometric universe that helped form the mind of Copernicus.
In mathematics the Renaissance made its greatest contribution to the
rise of modern science. Humanists included arithmetic and geometry in
the liberal arts curriculum; artists furthered the geometrization of
space in their work on perspective; Leonardo da Vinci perceived, however
faintly, that the world was ruled by “number.” The interest in algebra
in the Renaissance universities, according to the 20th-century historian
of science George Sarton, “was creating a kind of fever.” It produced
some mathematical theorists of the first rank, including Niccolò
Tartaglia and Girolamo Cardano. If they had done nothing else,
Renaissance scholars would have made a great contribution to mathematics
by translating and publishing, in 1544, some previously unknown works of
Archimedes, perhaps the most important of the ancients in this field.
If the Renaissance role in the rise of modern science was more that
of midwife than of parent, in the realm of technology the proper image
is the Renaissance magus, manipulator of the hidden forces of nature.
Working with medieval perceptions of natural processes, engineers and
technicians of the 15th and 16th centuries achieved remarkable results
and pushed the traditional cosmology to the limit of its explanatory
powers. This may have had more to do with changing social needs than
with changes in scientific theory. Warfare was one catalyst of practical
change that stimulated new theoretical questions. With the spread of the
use of artillery, for example, questions about the motion of bodies in
space became more insistent, and mathematical calculation more critical.
The manufacture of guns also stimulated metallurgy and fortification;
town planning and reforms in the standards of measurement were related
to problems of geometry. The Renaissance preoccupation with alchemy, the
parent of chemistry, was certainly stimulated by the shortage of
precious metals, made more acute by the expansion of government and
expenditures on war.
The most important technological advance of all, because it underlay
progress in so many other fields, strictly speaking, had little to do
with nature. This was the development of printing, with movable metal
type, about the mid-15th century in Germany. Johannes Gutenberg is
usually called its inventor, but in fact many people and many steps were
involved. Block printing on wood came to the West from China between
1250 and 1350, papermaking came from China by way of the Arabs to
12th-century Spain, whereas the Flemish technique of oil painting was
the origin of the new printers’ ink. Three men of Mainz—Gutenberg and
his contemporaries Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer—seem to have taken the
final steps, casting metal type and locking it into a wooden press. The
invention spread like the wind, reaching Italy by 1467, Hungary and
Poland in the 1470s, and Scandinavia by 1483. By 1500 the presses of
Europe had produced some six million books. Without the printing press
it is impossible to conceive that the Reformation would have ever been
more than a monkish quarrel or that the rise of a new science, which was
a cooperative effort of an international community, would have occurred
at all. In short, the development of printing amounted to a
communications revolution of the order of the invention of writing; and,
like that prehistoric discovery, it transformed the conditions of life.
The communications revolution immeasurably enhanced human opportunities
for enlightenment and pleasure on one hand and created previously
undreamed-of possibilities for manipulation and control on the other.
The consideration of such contradictory effects may guard us against a
ready acceptance of triumphalist conceptions of the Renaissance or of
historical change in general.
Donald Weinstein
