The Renaissance

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 ofthe 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 standardsof 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  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 newenergy due to improved diets. As in Roman times, the medieval Italian town lived in close relation to its surrounding rural area, orcontado; Italian city folk seldom relinquished their ties to the landfrom 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 inresisting 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 naturalenmity 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 burnedand their property confiscated. Winners had to be forever vigilantagainst the unending conspiracies of exiles yearning to return to their homes and families.

During the 14th century a number of cities, despairing of findinga 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 mostdid, to rule through existing republican institutions. Sometimes asignoria 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 Burckhardtbelieved, Italy in the 14th century had not shaken off feudalism. In the south, feudalism was entrenched in the loosely centralizedKingdom 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 longerlife; but even these bastions of liberty had intervals of disguised or open lordship. The great maritime republic of  Venice reversedthe 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.

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, fundeddebt, 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 monasteriesas 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 theexpansion 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 undercontrol, 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.

Italian  humanism

The notion that ancient wisdom and eloquence lay slumbering inthe 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 theidea 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.

Growth of literacy

Nevertheless, the classical revival of the Italian Renaissance was so different from these earlier movements in spirit and substancethat the humanists might justifiably claim that it was original andunique. 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. Paduanclassicism 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 Romanlaw 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.

Language and eloquence

It was Francesco Petrarca, or  Petrarch, who first understood fullythat 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'sentire 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 ofthe 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  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 masteryof 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 asa university professor.

Formal education was only one of several ways in which the humanists shaped the minds of their age. Many were themselvesfine  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 andformalistic, 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.

 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 madeavailable 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.

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 gracefuldiscussion 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 arerevealing studies of the effect of love upon the lover; his Italia miais 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 scenesof Lorenzo's poems suggest how he found relief from a busy public life; his love songs to his mistresses and his bawdy carnivalballads 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.

Florence was only one centre of the flowering of the vernacular.  Ferrara saw literature and art flourish under the patronage of theruling  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 poetsof 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 fromtheir medieval roots.

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 Gnosticdoctrines 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 humanistshad 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. Thereseems 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 ofman,” 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.

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 areimmoderate 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 onthe 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 publiclife.

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 thecity'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. Atthe 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 subordinatedto Christianity than were jurisprudence or medicine. The simplestexample 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:

 

Machiavelli's own country was Florence; when he wrote that he loved his country more than he loved his soul, he was consciouslyforsaking 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 towriting 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 turningpoint 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 theweb of fortune. This view of history was already far from the worldof 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 ofexternal 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 northern Renaissance

Political, economic, and socialbackground

In 1494 King  Charles VIII of Franceled 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. Indestroying 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 Italiansand 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 untoall 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 theLow Countries, Sicily, Naples, Milan, Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines and drafting his orders to them in letters signed “I theKing.” 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 domesticfrontier 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 of19. 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 aswell 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 exceptto 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 marketfor 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; 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.)

Northern  humanism

Cities were also markets for culture. The resumption of urban growth in the second half of the 15th century coincided with thediffusion 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 humanismhad 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 inthe 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, particularlythe 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, includingthe 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 somuch to lay the groundwork for religious reform, ended by beingsuspect 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.

 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 underthe 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 everwritten,  The Imitation of Christ, attributed to Thomas à Kempis, amonk of the Windesheim Congregation.

One man whose life was changed by The Imitation was the 16th-century Spaniard  Ignatius of Loyola. After reading it, Loyolafounded 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 theclouds. 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 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, 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 ItalianRenaissance 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, theworks 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 levelsof their countrymen's character and experiences.

 

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 aseries 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 toinfluence 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 forcesand 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 arevolution, 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. Withthe 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 gunsalso 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 metaltype and locking it into a wooden press. The invention spread likethe wind, reaching Italy by 1467, Hungary and Poland in the 1470s, and Scandinavia by 1483. By 1500 the presses of Europehad produced some six million books. Without the printing press it is impossible to conceive that the Reformation would have everbeen 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.