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The Renaissance
I. The Italian Renaissance
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The Renaissance was an intellectual movement that began in Italy in the 14th
century
o two key hallmarks of the Renaissance were:
 an extreme hostility to the culture of the Middle Ages
 a fascination with the ancient world
 The Renaissance was the first, for example, to use the term "Dark
Ages" to describe the period after the fall of Rome.
o Their love affair with the ancients led to an increasing literacy in Latin and
Greek--the term "Renaissance" is this sense refers to the rebirth of the
classic Greek and Roman ways
o The main emphasis of the Renaissance centered around the individual and
the potential of human nature
o At first, it was restricted to a relatively small group of educated, selfconscious elites, but especially in the north, it spread out to embrace other
social classes which deeply affected the history of Europe
o In short, most historians mark the Italian Renaissance as the beginning of
the modern world
Why did it begin in Italy?
o The northern Italian cities had led the way in the economic revival of the
12th and 13th centuries--art flourishes in a society with money
 Florence, especially, at the end of the 13th century became the
bankers to the pope, taking a sizable cut out of church transactions
for its services.
 The Italian middle classes wanted to show off their pride in their
city states
 Italy had never been completely feudalized either; cities had
always survived there and the tradition of lay education remained
strong.
o Moreover, Italian society of the 14th century was primarily urban
 Nobles here lived in cities, a stone's throw from one another, so
ideas could spread more rapidly here than in the isolated manors of
northern Europe
o Finally, Italian artists considered themselves the natural heirs to Roman art
because they were surrounded with the remaining monuments
o In the Renaissance, Italy would enjoy the prestige that France had had in
the Gothic period.
The ideals of the Renaissance centered on individualism, the hallmark of the
period
o for example, Renaissance writers invented the autobiography, a form
which presumes the reader is not only interested in your particular life, but
in how you tell it
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They were proud of their abilities and scorned the Christian humility that
the Middle Ages prized
o When the public thought Donatello had sculpted the Pietá, Michelangelo
crept into St. Peters at night and carved his name, Michelangelo
Buonarotti, across the Virgin's dress, so everyone would know he was the
artist
The revival of antiquity led to a copying of the lives of the ancients, including an
archaeological zeal in finding old manuscripts and uncovering Roman statues
The Renaissance was secular in orientation, concentrating its attention on the here
and now unlike the medieval concern for the world to come
o This secularism resulted in extravagant dress as well as greater
refinements in manners, as well as an increase in personal hygiene
o The contempt for the world theme of medieval religious literature
disappeared; instead of the great cathedrals, one sees the private palaces of
insecure, social climbing princes
o There was, however, little concern for ordinary men
 This was no Age of the Common Man, but was instead confined to
a cultured elite
o The Italian Renaissance thinkers remained good Christians
 They were aware of the abuses of the church, but found them a
subject of mirth rather than a clarion call for reform
o The Renaissance indulged in a consumerism some of the age's admirers
have refused to recognize
 The elites were very concerned with acquiring and then displaying
their wealth
 The Virgin Mary was often painted surrounded by desirable
worldy objects, reminding the viewer than sanctity would bring
one wealth
 And paintings became more numerous because they were cheaper
to produce than labor-intensive mosaics; the gold leaf that had
adorned paintings of the Middle Ages disappeared so that the cost
of the painting decreased, thus allowing more people to display
more art, thus increasing their social status
The Renaissance was also the first period to embrace quantification
o For the first time, clocks helped quantify time with hours of the same
length
 The medieval belief in the timelessness of the world disappeared to
be replaced by the Renaissance's obsession with time and numbers
 The new vogue for clocks on the village church helped to educate
even peasants about new ideas of time and orderliness
o Renaissance thinkers saw numbers as neutral things, rather than imbued
with special characteristics and religious meaning
 Medieval scholars, for example, saw 6 as a perfect number because
it was created by adding the numbers of the Trinity; Renaissance
people saw 6 as simply a number like any other
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One of the earliest examples of this rage for quantification was music that
was now divided into equal measures; music could be "seen."
 the musical staff was Europe's first graph
Humanism
o The Renaissance ideas all came together in a new philosophy known as
humanism
 This involved the study of the classics to create a new definition of
what made man truly human
 To quote Erasmus, "Men are made, not born."
 This was far cry from the medieval assumption that man was born
with a soul that distinguished him from the animals
 Now, to be truly human, one would need to become truly educated
o Humanists differed from those who had studied the ancient works before;
they did not feel inferior to the ancients, but rather saw themselves as
equals
 Humanists stressed the dignity of man, the best of God's creatures
below the angels
 Moreover, they did not interpret these ancient texts for their
Christian meaning, but instead tried to see them on their own terms
 Aristotle, humanists would argue, was not a proto-Christian,
having lived centuries before Christ, but rather a Greek who would
have to be understood in terms of his own culture
o In a profound way, the humanists and the Renaissance invented
history. Humanists were excited by the purity of ancient Latin, scorning
the barbaric Latin of the medieval church
 Their insistence on going back to the original texts helped them to
expose errors in translation, not just of Aristotle and Cicero, but
more importantly of the Latin Vulgate Bible then in use in the
Catholic Church
Renaissance art
o One place that clearly demonstrates the ideas of humanism is Renaissance
art
 Most art was now bought by patrons who were not churchmen, but
rather important secular people like bankers
 This freed art from service to religion, permitting themes and
treatments that would have been off limits in a church
 The emphasis on individualism led to the development of the
individual portrait, where the sitter was presented warts and all, not
idealized but realistically
 Even the human body was presented in a more scientific
and natural manner
 One thinks of Michelangelo dissecting bodies to discover
how muscles were connected so he could draw everything
exactly (dissection was very much against church doctrines
and law at the time.)
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Perhaps most important, artists were now regarded as intellectual
geniuses, not simply craftsmen
 Some became quite wealthy; Michelangelo was paid 3000
ducats to decorate the Sistine Chapel when a man could
live like a prince on 300 a year
 He even refused payment for working on St. Peters Basilica
because he was already so rich
o New technological advances made much of Renaissance art possible
 Oil painting allowed richer, deeper colors, and required much less
speed to produce than frescoes which had to be painted while the
plaster was still wet
 Oil paintings could be done in the north where wetter, colder
climates caused frescoes to pop off the wall, something which
bedeviled Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper painted in wet Milan
rather than drier Rome
 Brunelleschi's Dome of the Cathedral Santa Maria del Flore in
Florence as an engineering marvel
o Renaissance artists were interested in making money and changed their
style and production techniques to maximize their profit
 Albrecht Durer, for example, refused to do more oil paintings
because they were so time consuming, and he concentrated instead
on wood block prints that were quick and more profitable
 More painters entered the middle classes as a result of their
improved fortunes
 Patron consumerism was reflected in the popularity of tapestries
 Such works ostentatiously displayed the owner's wealth and
erudition, and moreover the tapestries could easily by moved if the
owner changed residences in a way a fresco could not
Niccolo Machiavelli
o the key political thinker of the Renaissance
o The Prince
 written as a how-to manual for his Florentine patrons
 Machiavelli focuses on the individual qualities needed to rule
 The Prince is filled with harsh advice--murder, intrigue, betrayal-basically describing what it takes to gain power and stay in power
 there are no notions of rulership by "divine right" in Machiavelli's
writing, simply a naked truth about what it took to be a ruler in
those times
The Renaissance may have begun in Italy, but as it spread north, it changed in
ways that would have a profound impact on the development of Protestantism
As many historians have noted, once you had the Renaissance with its ideals of
individualism, historical precision, and understanding people in the context of
their original cultures, the Protestant reformation was inevitable.
II. Northern Renaissance
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The Renaissance spread north about 1500
o Students from the North carried the ideals of the Italian Renaissance back
with them
o Spanish and French armies invading Italy were exposed to new theories
before returning home
o More important was printing with moveable type, invented in the mid15th century, which made printing easier and cheaper; this helped spread
books and knowledge of Renaissance ideals as well
But soon differences developed between the northern and southern Renaissance
o In the north, the prime patrons were kings of the new nation states, not the
wealthy burghers of Italy adding prestige to their cities
o The northern Renaissance had a more Christian, religious aspect than did
the more Greco-Roman, pagan aspect of Italian Renaissance
 The north had always stressed theology in its universities, while
Italy had trained lawyers and administrators in its schools
 In the north, they edited the commentaries of St. Paul, in the south,
Plato; both were Greek writers, but one was a father of the
Christian church and the other a pagan philosopher
o Northern humanists tended to be of a more varied social background as
well, unlike the elites of Italy
 Perhaps because of this, northern Renaissance thinkers were more
willing to write for a lay audience, not just the educated
intelligentsia
Erasmus
o An example of the northern Renaissance is Erasmus, a Christian humanist
who sought to blend the humanities with the Christian tradition
 To the stoical patience, calmness and broadmindedness of the
classical period, Erasmus sought to add the Christian virtues like
love, faith, and hope
 He faced up to the serious ills of his time, becoming a reformer,
especially of religion
 His ideas are characterized by a tolerant view of man
 He was horrified by the intolerance of Luther, for example
 Erasmus was interested in developing ethical purity of religion
which the Italians by and large were not, and he showed great faith
in education to prepare people for a pious life
 He was impressed with the purity and simplicity of the early
Christians, as opposed to the formalism and complexities of the
Renaissance church
Art of the Northern Renaissance
o Northern Renaissance painting reflected these differences in ideas of the
Italian and Northern Renaissances
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It is characterized by a deep religious feeling and spiritualism
frequently missing in the south
 When Hans Memling did a portrait, the sitter was almost always in
an attitude of prayer, rather than dressed in Sunday best facing the
artist
 Even the architecture of the north remained Gothic, a truly
"Christian architecture," they believed, as opposed to the pagan
Roman building of the south
 Towns halls remained mini-cathedrals. The frescoes of Italy were
rarely seen in the north, and instead they experimented with oil
painting and the meticulous care of miniatures
o Durer and Brueghel
 The two most famous of these northern painters may be Albrecht
Dürer and Peter Brueghel
 Durer
 Dürer got the idea of perspective, the new use of color and
modeling from Italy, but his themes tend to be religious
 Primarily an engraver, Dürer remained concerned with
outline and extraordinary attention to detail
 Many of his drawings could easily be turned into wood
block suitable for printing in books
 Brueghel
 Brueghel shows the religious aspect of the north as well in
his Slaughter of the Innocents
 Most artists approached this subject by painting a mythical
scene of people dressed in vaguely Roman costumes, but
Brueghel painted it as a Flemish village being attacked by
Spanish soldiers
 Flanders were being occupied by the Spanish and the
Flemish people resented it greatly
 One sees here the close alliance of religion and politics so
typical of the north as well as the idea that religion was not
far away and irrelevant but contemporary and vital
As historians have argued, the Reformation had to begin in the north
III. Social Life in Renaissance Europe
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Marriage and family
o Marriage for Catholics was dominated by economic factors, not love or
physical attraction
 Men needed to have sufficient land before marrying, meaning they
usually had to wait until the father died or yielded up the land
 That meant people continued to marry late, and this in turn
affected the number of children a couple had
 Divorce according to the Catholic church simply did not exist
except for non-consummation of the marriage
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But while divorce was impossible, marriage was easy
 All it took was an oral promise between the two partners
 The church preferred to have these vows solemnized in the
church, but it was not technically necessary
 To be sure, difficulties arose when one party claimed such
a promise had taken place in secret when the other one
denied it
 Grievances resulting from these misunderstandings kept
ecclesiastic (church) courts busy for years
Protestants changed the concept of marriage, praising it as a noble estate
rather than a third best alternative to celibacy
 They used the cloister as a symbol of what they saw as the church's
anti-feminism
 Protestants argued that putting women in a home would liberate
them from the sexual repression, cultural deprivation and male
clerical rule which characterized the nunnery
 Because of their more favorable view of marriage, Protestants
made it easier, reducing the number of impediments prescribed by
the Catholic church
 So successful was this that the Catholic quickly followed
suit
 Protestants rejected the idea of marriage as a sacrament, and so
they permitted divorce
 It certainly wasn't easy, however
 Protestants argued in favor of the sexual and spiritual
equality of the spouses, and so passed tough laws against
wife beating
 Many women joined the Protestant faiths hoping to escape
violent husbands, and in fact much modern research has
demonstrated the critical role of women in allowing the
new faith to spread
 Protestants practiced contraception as well with the aid of
botanicals high in estrogen
 Pennyroyal, Queen Anne's lace and myrtle, for example,
were used, but one needed to know how to harvest and
prepare them
 Without such knowledge, these botanicals became highly
poisonous
 Most had as much as a 70% effectiveness rate in preventing
or terminating pregnancies
Size of families
 Renaissance women bore more babies than women do nowadays,
delivering a child on average once every 24-30 months
 Ten percent of women died in childbirth, a rate 20 to 24 times
higher than in the 19th century
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City born babies died twice as fast as country born ones, even
though the city baby might be sent to the country within days of its
birth
Since daughters in a family dived the family wealth when they
received a dowry to marry, "superfluous" daughters were sent to
convents which required a dowry but a much smaller one
 In 16th century, half of women from elite families ended up
in convents
Witchcraft
o The witchcraft craze of the early Renaissance pitted women against one
another and against the state
o From about 1450 to 1625, 200,000 people were killed as witches, 85% of
them women
o Women's subculture of the Middle Ages which had brought forth the
chivalric movement now dissolved under the pressure of the witch hunts;
inquisitors pursued women who knew one another, making it dangerous
for a woman to have many female friends
o For women, the individualism of the Renaissance was based on fear of one
another
Food and Eating
o Food was a basic concern of all periods
 Most food to be preserved over the long winter was either salted or
dried, a process based on the Egyptian process of embalming
 Especially popular was preserved herring, a trade dominated by the
Hanseatic League and the source of its wealth
 People depended on preserved foods for winter and spring, before
crops began producing fresh food again
 Bringing back this salted food was back-breaking work, since the
food would have to be soaked in many changes of water, all of
which would have to be drawn from a well
 Usually, people cooked something along with the food, like beans,
to absorb the salt they could not get out by rinsing
 The food thus presented was salty and bland, and so it was served
with spicy sauces into which the meat or fish, cut into small pieces,
was dunked
o Spices
 The yellow sauce, made of ginger and saffron, and the green sauce,
made of ginger, cardamom, cloves and green herbs, were as
common as mustard and ketchup on a modern American table
 Pepper became so valuable it was used as part of a dowry
 Europeans, chronically short of hard currency, sometimes used
spices to pay their debts
 These spices were not always used to cover up the taste of spoiled
meat, however; spices were abandoned long before reliable
refrigeration came into use that actually retarded spoilage
 In fact, these spices were a matter of acquired taste
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Spices were also associated with Paradise; Europeans
believed that Eden was a real place that simply had to be
discovered
 The mania for spices thus helps explain the drive to get to the
Spice Islands and India by sea
 In the beginning, the rich and the poor ate the same food, only the
rich ate more of it
 But in the Renaissance, the upper and middle class diet
began to change
 They abandoned spices as old-fashioned and began to
present foods in simple sauces that allowed the natural
flavor to be revealed
 The Italians were the first to emerge from world of
medieval spices and cooking
 The new Italian cooking techniques were transferred to
France when Catherine de Medici arrived from Florence to
marry Henry II, carrying with her a battery of Italian chefs
 Many of these new cooking ideas were written down in
cookery books that were among the earliest printed
materials
o Table Manners
 Table manners were poor by modern standards
 People used their fingers to eat, rather than forks that could
become dangerous weapons in the hands of easily excitable
individualists
 Indeed, as late as 1897, British sailors were forbidden to use forks
because it was said to do so would damage their manliness
 People were always scratching because of fleas and lice, and
courtesy books recommended openly washing your hands before
choosing your meat so everyone would know your hands were
clean
Changes in Warfare and the Printing Press
o Social life in the Renaissance was affected by two major changes that
helped create the devastating loss of life associated with the wars of
religion
o These two developments were changes in warfare and the development of
printing with movable type
o Changes in Warfare
 The changes in warfare created the huge population losses we
associate with Renaissance war and the need for substantial tax
increases to provide for the large armies
 Gunpowder was increasingly used with the result that killing now
took place at a great distance and indiscriminately
 The cannons required mass armies unlike the ragtag bands
of feudalism
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Each marching square surrounding the cannon batteries
contained 3000 men
 Thus, Spain by the mid-16th century had an army of 40,000
 Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden, developed the
salvo in which he fired all his cannons at once instead of in
sequence
 The Swedes lost continuity of fire but produced a fearsome
blast which could shatter an enemy's ranks
 By the mid-17th century when Gustavus Adolphus ruled,
the Swedish army was 175,000, and Louis XIV of France
toward the end of the century considered 400,000 a
necessity
 Such large armies meant the use of conscription because
volunteers were so unreliable, and armies also had to stay
encamped year round, instead of just in the summer, since
collecting so many men and then dispersing them a few months
later was too difficult to do
 Such large armies would also have to paid year round,
meaning a huge rise in taxes, primarily on the poor who
paid most of the taxes and were most of the recruits
 Nonetheless, the new armies created some social mobility,
especially for artillery officers who needed expertise
 Armies in some cases became too expensive to actually risk
in battle!
 When Sulieman attacked Vienna, for example, he was so
deeply in debt he dared not use his army and instead
paraded them around the walls of the city in a magnificent
show of his power, hoping the city would surrender based
only on his displayed might
 As the armies became more professionalized, a large bureaucracy
was created to mobilize a country for war, a development that
spurred absolutism
The Printing Press
 Printing also helped spread the Protestant Reformation's ideas and
thus helped cause religious divisions which encouraged bloody,
Renaissance warfare
 Printing with moveable type replaced block printing from
China
 Paper had not been a problem since the mid-1400s, but
wooden blocks had to be individually carved and frequently
became saturated with ink making the image blurred
 Using individual metal letters allowed many copies to be
made from the same setting without smudging
 The Italians abandoned the Gothic script first used by Gutenberg
for the Carolingian minuscule, which they insisted on calling
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Roman style, since they would not admit the medieval period
could have invented anything worth having
Books, like Renaissance paintings, became a marketable
commodity
 While books became cheaper to produce using the printing
press, they were more lavishly bound to serve as examples
of the owner's erudition and wealth
Quantification also increased with the printing press; now uniform
page numbers allowed two readers to compare exactly the same
passage with ease
Medieval scribes would have been unable to reproduce the
complex illustration of machines or maps of the New World which
the Renaissance needed to difuse such knowledge quickly and
accurately
Printing in a profound way made the Reformation possible,
because while challenges to church abuses had popped up before,
they had almost always been local phenomena
 Luther, by printing his sermons and treatises and spreading
them quickly throughout large populations made it
impossible for the church to contain his influence in any
one area