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"The
Northern Renaissance,"
The Italian Renaissance had placed human beings once more in the center of life's stage and infused thought and art with humanistic values. In time the stimulating ideas current in Italy spread to other areas and combined with indigenous developments to produce a French Renaissance, an English Renaissance, and so on.
Throughout the fifteenth century the matriculation records of Italian universities listed hundreds of northern European students. While their chief interest was the study of law and medicine, many were influenced by the intellectual climate of Italy with its new enthusiasm for the classics. When these students returned home, they often carried manuscripts - and later printed editions - of classical and humanist writers. By this time, scholasticism had declined into sterile repetition and logical subleties, and literate laymen and pious clerics in the North were ready to welcome the new outlook of humanism.
The Influence Of Printing
Very important in the diffusion of the Renaissance and later in the success of the Reformation was the invention of printing in Europe. The essential elements - paper and block printing - had been known in China since the eighth century. During the twelfth century the Spanish Muslims introduced papermaking to Europe; in the thirteenth century Europeans were in close contact with China (see ch. 8) and block printing became known in the West. The crucial step was taken in the 1440s at Mainz, Germany, where Johann Gutenberg and other printers invented movable type by cutting up old printing blocks to form individual letters. Gutenberg used movable type to print papal documents and the first printed version of the Bible (1454).
Soon all the major countries of Europe possessed the means for printing books. In 1465 two Germans brought printing to Italy, and within four years the works of eight classical authors (including Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Pliny, and Caesar) had been printed there. In all of Europe during the remainder of the century an estimated 40,000 titles were published. It is said that the prices of books sank to one eighth of their former cost thus placing books within the reach of many people who formerly had been unable to buy them. In addition, pamphlets and controversial tracts soon were widely circulated, and new ideas reached a thousand times more people in a relatively short span of time. In the quickening of Europe's intellectual life, it is difficult to overestimate the effects of the printing press. Without printing it is doubtful that a German writer at the end of the fifteenth century could have made the exaggerated boast that "once upon a time Germany was poor in wisdom, power, and wealth; now it is not only equal to others in glorious work, but surpasses loquacious Greece, [and] proud Italy."
Erasmus And Northern Humanism
The intellectual life of the first half of the sixteenth century was dominated by the Dutch humanist, Desiderius Erasmus (1466?-1536). Although born in Rotterdam, he passed most of his long life elsewhere - in Germany, France, England, Italy, and especially Switzerland. The most influential and cosmopolitan of the northern humanists, he corresponded with nearly every prominent writer and thinker in Europe and knew personally popes, emperors, and kings. He was the scholar of Europe, and his writings were read eagerly everywhere.
Perhaps the most famous and influential work by Erasmus was The Praise of Folly, a satire written in 1511 at the house of the English humanist Sir Thomas More. Folly, the term used in the Middle Ages as a synonym for human nature, is described by Erasmus as the source not only of much harmless enjoyment in life but also of many things that are wrong and need correcting. A historian has described the work in these words:
At first the book makes kindly and approving fun of the ways of action and the foibles and weaknesses of mankind. It is not mordant, only amused. But gradually from fools innocent and natural and undebased, it passes to those whose illusions are vicious in their setting and results. ^11
[Footnote 11: H. O. Taylor, Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1920), vol. 1, p. 175.]
Among such are merchants ("they lie, swear, cheat, and practice all the intrigues of dishonesty"), lawyers ("they of all men have the greatest conceit of their own abilities"), scholastic philosophers ("that talk as much by rote as a parrot"), and scientists ("who esteem themselves the only favorites of wisdom, and look upon the rest of mankind as the dirt and rubbish of the creation"). Most roughly handled are churchmen, in particular monks, who are "impudent pretenders to the profession of piety," and popes, cardinals, and bishops, "who in pomp and splendor have almost equalled if not outdone secular princes." While his satire is indeed harsh, Erasmus was himself balanced, moderate, and intolerant only of bigotry, ignorance, greed, and violence.
The Praise of Folly points up a significant difference between the northern humanists and their Italian predecessors. Most Italian humanists - the civic humanists - spoke to and for the upper-class elements in their city-states. They urged political leaders to become more statesmanlike, businessmen to become more generous with their wealth, and all to become more moral. They did not dissent or speak out in opposition; in urging the elite groups to assume their responsibilities, they were actually trying to defend, not condemn, them. Italian humanism "centered on the liberality or parsimony of princes, on the moral worth of riches, and on the question of how to define true nobility.' " ^12 The northern humanists, on the other hand, like Erasmus in The Praise of Folly, spoke out against a broad range of political, social, economic, and religious evils. They faced reality and became ardent reformers of society's ills.
[Footnote 12: Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 208.]
The northern humanists also went further than the Italians in broadening their interest in ancient literature to include early Christian writings - the Scriptures and the works of the church Fathers. This led them to prepare new and more accurate editions of the Scriptures (Erasmus' Greek edition of the New Testament became famous and was used by Luther) and to compare unfavorably the complexities of the church in their own day with the simplicity of early Christianity. Since they held that the essence of religion was morality and rational piety - what Erasmus called the "philosophy of Christ" - rather than ceremony and dogma, it is not surprising that the church became a major target of their reforming zeal.
Sir Thomas More's Utopia
The most significant figure in English humanism was Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), the friend of Erasmus. More is best known for his Utopia, the first important description of an ideal state since Plato's Republic. In this extraordinarily realistic work, More criticized his age by using as his spokesman a fictitious sailor who contrasts the ideal life he has seen in Utopia (The Land of Nowhere) with the harsh conditions of life in England. More's denunciations centered on the new acquisitive capitalism, which he blamed for the widespread insecurity and misery of the lower classes. More felt that governments
are a conspiracy of the rich, who, in pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, ... first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labor for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please. ^13
[Footnote 13: From the 1684 translation by Gilbert Burnet, in Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West: A Source Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), vol. 1, p. 461.]
In Utopia, by contrast, no one is in want because the economy is planned and cooperative and because property is held in common. Utopia is the only true commonwealth, concludes More's imaginary sailor:
In all other places, it is visible that while people talk of a commonwealth, every man only seeks his own wealth: but there, where no man has any property, all men zealously pursue the good of the public ... . [I]n Utopia, where every man has a right to every thing, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want any thing; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties; neither apprehending want himself, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife? ^14
[Footnote 14: Introduction to Contemporary Civilization, p. 460.]
More was the first of the modern English socialists, but his philosophy should not be considered a forerunner of the socialism of our day. His economic outlook was a legacy from the Middle Ages, and his preference for medieval collectivism over modern economic individualism was of a piece with his preference for a church headed - medieval style - by popes rather than by kings, a view that prompted Henry VIII, who had appropriated the pope's position as head of the church in England, to execute him for treason.
Rabelais' Gargantua And Pantagruel
One of the best known of the French humanists was Francois Rabelais (1494-1553). A brilliant, if coarse, lover of all life from the sewers to the heavens, Rabelais is best remembered for his Gargantua and Pantagruel. Centering on figures from French folklore this work relates the adventures of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, genial giants of tremendous stature and appetite, to whom were ascribed many marvelous feats.
With much burlesque humor - hence the term "Rabelaisian" - Rabelais satirized his society while putting forth his humanist views on educational reform and inherent human goodness. He made vitriolic attacks on the abuses of the church and the shortcomings of scholastics and monks, but he had no patience with overzealous Protestants either. What Rabelais could not stomach was hypocrisy and repression and for those guilty of these tendencies he reserved his choicest invective. He bid his readers to flee from that
rabble of squint-minded fellows, dissembling and counterfeit saints, demure lookers, hypocrites, pretended zealots, tough friars, buskin-monks, and other such sects of men, who disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world .... Fly from these men, abhor and hate them as much as I do, and upon my faith you will find yourself the better for it. And if you desire ... to live in peace, joy, health, making yourselves always merry, never trust those men that always peep out through a little hole. ^15
[Footnote 15: Quoted in H. O. Taylor, Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 328-329.]
Von Hutten: German Humanist And Patriot
One of the outstanding German humanists was Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523). In him was blended a zeal for religious reform and German nationalist feelings. This member of an aristocratic family, who wanted to unite Germany under the emperor, led a tumultuous life as a wandering Greek scholar and satirist. He supported Luther as a rallying point for German unity against the papacy, to which he attributed most of his country's ills. Von Hutten reflected the tensions and aspirations of the German people in the early years of the Protestant revolt against the papacy (see ch. 13).
Montaigne's Essays
The last notable northern humanist was the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). At the age of thirty-eight he gave up the practice of law and retired to his country estate and well-stocked library, where he studied and wrote. Montaigne developed a new literary form and gave it its name - the essay. In ninety-four essays he set forth his personal views on many subjects: leisure, friendship, education, philosophy, religion, old age, death, and so forth. He did not pretend to have the final answer to the subjects he discussed. Instead, he advocated open-mindedness and toleration - rare qualities in the sixteenth century, when France was racked by religious and civil strife.
Montaigne condemned the pedantry and formalism into which humanism and humanistic education had largely degenerated by the end of the sixteenth century. "To know by heart is not to know; it is to retain what we have given our memory to keep," he wrote, and added that
Our tutors never stop bawling into our ears, as though they were pouring water into a funnel; and our task is only to repeat what has been told us. I should like the tutor to correct this practice .... I want him to listen to his pupil speaking in his turn. ^16
[Footnote 16: Montaigne, "Of the Education of Children," in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. D. M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 112.]
Montaigne's final essay, entitled "Of Experience," which developed the thought that "when reason fails us we resort to experience," is an acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of humanism and a foreshadowing of the coming triumph of science.
Cervantes' Don Quixote
In the national literatures that matured during the Northern Renaissance, the transition from feudal knight to Renaissance courtier finds its greatest literary expression in a masterpiece of Spanish satire, Don Quixote de la Mancha, the work of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). By Cervantes' day knighthood had become an anachronism, though its accompanying code of chivalry still retained its appeal. It remained for a rationalist like Cervantes to show up the inadequacies of chivalric idealism in a world that had acquired new, and intensely practical, aims. He did so by creating a pathetic but infinitely appealing character to serve as the personification of an outmoded way of life.
Don Quixote, "the knight of the woeful countenance," mounted on his "lean, lank, meagre, drooping, sharp-backed, and raw-boned" steed Rozinante, sets out in the Spanish countryside to right wrongs and uphold his lady's and his own honor. In his misadventures he is accompanied by his squire, the much less gallant but infinitely more realistic Sancho Panza, whose peasant adages and hard-grained common sense serve as a contrast to the unpractical nature of his master's chivalric code. Tilting at windmills, mistaking serving wenches for highborn ladies and inns for castles, and lamenting the invention of gunpowder as depriving ardent knights of a chance to win immortality, Don Quixote is, on the surface at least, a ridiculous old man whose nostalgia for the "good old days" is a constant source of grief to him. Thus the story represents a superb satire directed against the outworn ideology of the Middle Ages; in particular, it laughed the ideal of chivalric romance into the world of make-believe.
And yet Don Quixote is still more. Cervantes instilled in his main character a pathos born in large measure of the author's own career of frustrated hopes and ambitions. As a result, Don Quixote becomes more than a romantic lunatic; he serves to embody that set of ideals each of us would like to see realized but that we must compromise in a world that has other interests to serve.
Secular Drama Appears
Like Greek drama, medieval drama developed out of religious ceremonies. A complete divorce of the church and stage did not occur until the middle of the fifteenth century when the Renaissance era of drama began in Italian cities with the performance of ancient Roman comedies. In the following century appeared the commedia dell' arte, reflections of everyday life in vulgar and slapstick fashion, usually improvised by the players from a plot outline.
As secular dramas grew in popularity, theaters were built as permanent settings for their presentations. Great ingenuity was shown in the design of elaborate, realistic stage scenery as well as in lighting and sound effects. Theaters embodying these innovations only gradually appeared outside Italy. Not until 1576 was the first public theater erected in London; three years later, a similar theater was constructed in Madrid.
Imitating the ancient models they admired, French and Italian writers followed what they believed were the rigid conventions of the classical drama and, to a large extent, catered to the tastes of the aristocracy. By contrast, Spanish and English playwrights created a theatrical environment that was at once more socially democratic, more hospitable to national themes, and less concerned with classical models.
William Shakespeare
The reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) climaxed the English Renaissance and produced such a galaxy of talented writers that one would have to go back as far as Athens in the fifth century B.C. to find an age as rich with literary genius. Strongly influenced by the royal court, which served as the busy center of intellectual and artistic life, these writers produced works that were highly colored, richly romantic, and often wildly extravagant in spite of all their poetic allusions to classical times.
The supreme figure in Elizabethan literature and perhaps in all literature is William Shakespeare (1564-1616). His rich vocabulary and poetic imagery were matched by his turbulent imagination. He was a superb lyric poet, and numerous critics have judged him the foremost sonnet writer in the English language.
Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays - comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. His historical plays reflected the patriotic upsurge experienced by the English after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For his comedies tragedies, and romances, Shakespeare was content in a great majority of cases to borrow plots from earlier works. His forte lay in his creation of character - perhaps the richest and most diversified collection conceived by the mind of one man - and in his ability to translate his knowledge of human nature into dramatic speech and action. Today his comedies are played to enthusiastic audiences: The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, are but a few. But it is in his tragedies that the poet-dramatist runs the gamut of human emotion and experience. Shakespeare possessed in abundance the Renaissance concern for human beings and the world around them. Hence his plays deal first and foremost with the human personality, passions, and problems. In such works as Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, the problems of love and sex are studied from many angles. Jealousy is analyzed in Othello, ambition in Macbeth and Julius Caesar, family relationships in King Lear, and a man's struggle with his own soul in Hamlet. Shakespeare's extraordinary ability to build every concrete fact and action upon a universal truth makes his observations as applicable today as they were when first presented in the Globe Theater. Small wonder that next to the Bible, Shakespeare is the most quoted of all literary sources in the English language.
Northern Painting
Before the Italian Renaissance permeated the artistic circles of northern Europe, the painters of the Low Countries had been making significant advances on their own. Outstanding was the Flemish Jan van Eyck (1385?-1440), whose work has been called "the full flowering of the spirit of the late Middle Ages," for he continued to paint in the realistic manner developed by medieval miniaturists. Van Eyck also perfected the technique of oil painting, which enabled him to paint with greater realism and attention to detail. In his painting of the merchant Arnolfini and his wife, for example, he painstakingly gives extraordinary reality to every detail, from his own image reflected in the mirror in the background to individual hairs on the little dog in the foreground.
The first talented German painter to be influenced deeply by Italian art was Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) of Nuremberg. Durer made more than one journey to Italy, where he was impressed both with the painting of the Renaissance Italians and with the artists' high social statusa contrast with northern Europe where artists were still treated as craftsmen. His own work is a blend of the old and the new; thus his engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil, fuses the realism and symbolism of the Gothic with the nobility of Verrocchio's equestrian statue of Colleoni. In the long run Durer became better known for his numerous engravings and woodcuts than for his paintings.
Another famous German painter, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), chiefly painted portraits and worked abroad, especially in England. His memorable portraits blend the realism and concern for detail characteristic of all northern painting with Italian dignity.
Two northern painters who remained completely isolated from Italian influences were Hieronymus Bosch (1480-1516) and Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525?-1569). Brueghel retained a strong Flemish flavor in his portrayal of the faces and scenes of his native land. He painted village squares, landscapes, skating scenes, peasants at work and at leisure just as he saw them, with a reporter's eye for detail.
Very little is known about the Dutch master Bosch other than that he belonged to one of the many puritanical religious sects that were becoming popular. This accounts for his most famous painting, The Garden of Delights, a triptych whose main panel is filled with innumerable naked men and women reveling in the sins of the flesh. The smaller left panel, by contrast, depicts an idyllic Garden of Eden, while the right panel portrays a nightmarish Hell filled with frenzied sinners undergoing punishment. Bosch was a stern moralist whose obsession with sin and Hell reflects the fears of his contemporaries, which contributed to the religious movement to be described in the next chapter - the Reformation.
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