The Renaissance was nonetheless western civilization’s nexus to modernity, with particular gains in literature, art, philosophy, and political and historical thought. The notion of individualism was born during the Renaissance, as people sought personal credit for their achievements, as opposed to the medieval ideal of all glory going to God. These intellectual and artistic developments first took place in the vibrant world of the Italian city-states; eventually the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century allowed these cultural trends to spread to other parts of Europe, which resulted in the creation of the Northern Renaissance movement. The Italian Renaissance writers were primarily interested in secular concerns, but in the north of Europe the Renaissance dealt with religious concerns and ultimately helped lay the foundation for the Protestant Reformation.
The city-states of Renaissance Italy were at the center of Europe’s economic, political, and cultural life throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During the Middle Ages, the towns of northern Italy were nominally under the control of the Holy Roman Empire; residents, however, were basically free to decide their own fate, which resulted in a tumultuous political existence. The old nobility, whose wealth was based on land ownership, often conflicted with a new class of merchant families who had become wealthy in the economic boom times of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both groups had to contend with an urban underclass, known as the popolo or ''the people," who wanted their share of the wealth and political power. In Florence in 1378, the popolo expressed their dissatisfaction with the political and economic order by staging a violent struggle against the government that became known as the Ciompi revolt. The revolt shook Florence to its very core, and resulted in a brief period in which the poor established a tenuous control over the government. “As the burghers became a power with the rise of a money economy, as the small artisan became the great merchant, we find a gradual emancipation from the traditional forms of society and the mediaeval outlook: there was a revolt against those sections of society which were most dependent upon [early medieval] structure and upon these ways of thought, by virtue of which they exercised their authority” (Martin 1). This struggle reverberated in the other city-states throughout Italy. In Milan, the resulting social tensions led to the rise of a tyrant or signer; Florence and Venice remained republics after the revolt, but a few wealthy families dominated them. The most noteworthy of these families was the Medici, who used the wealth gained from banking to establish themselves first as the behind-the-scenes rulers of the Florentine republic and later as hereditary dukes of the city. The internal tensions within the city-states were matched by external rivalries as the assorted city-states were engaged in long-term warfare among themselves. By the mid-fifteenth century, these external wars had effectively narrowed the numerous city-states of the medieval age to just a few dominant states -- Florence, Milan, and Venice in the north, the papal states in central Italy, and the Kingdom of Naples in southern Italy.
In addition to every city-state's internal and external tensions that may have helped foment the creative energy that was so important to the Renaissance, economic factors also proved their significant agency. The Italian city-states were far more economically vibrant than the rest of Western Europe, with merchants carrying Italian wool and silk to every part of the continent and with Italian bankers providing loans for profit-driven European monarchs. Wealthy Italian merchants became important patrons of the arts and insisted on the development of secular art forms, such as portraiture, that would represent them and their accumulated wealth to greatest effect. Geography also played a role in the vibrant cultural life of the Italian Renaissance. Italy's central location in the Mediterranean was ideal for creating links between the Greek culture of the east and the Latin culture of the west. Southern Italy, moreover, had been home to many Greek colonies and later served as the center for the Roman Empire. Classical civilization had, in fact, never totally disappeared from the Italian mainland, even following the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth century.
Humanism is a highly debated term among historians, but most would not characterize it as representative of a particular philosophical viewpoint, but rather as a program of study, including rhetoric and literature, based on what students in the classical world (c. 500 B.C. - 500 A.D.) would have studied. Francesco Petrarch is often considered the father of humanism. Petrarch became dissatisfied with his career as a lawyer and set about to study literary classics. It was Petrarch who coined the phrase ''Dark Ages'' (c. 400-900) to denote what he thought was the cultural decline that took place following the collapse of the Roman world in the fifth century. While literate in medieval Latin from his study of law, Petrarch learned classical Latin as preparation to study these important literary works. In a task that was to become exceedingly important during the Renaissance, Petrarch sought out classical texts that had been largely unknown during the Middle Ages. It was common in the Middle Ages to become familiar with classical works not by directly reading the original manuscripts, but rather by reading secondary commentaries about the works. Petrarch set out to read the originals and quickly found himself engaged with such works as the letters of Cicero, an important politician and philosopher whose writings provide an account of the collapse of the Roman Republic. Cicero was a brilliant Latin stylist. To write in the Ciceronian style became the stated goal of Petrarch and those humanists who followed in his path. Although his contemporaries accused him of turning to the pagan culture of ancient Greece and Rome, Petrarch -- despite his fascination with classical culture -- did not reject Christianity. Instead, he argued for the universality of the ideas of the classical age. Petrarch contended that classical works, although clearly written by pagans, still contained lessons that were applicable to his own Christian age.
Although Petrarch was not interested in investigating how his studies of the classics could be used to educate others, his work did prove inspirational to a group of wealthy young Florentines known as the ''civic humanists.'' They viewed Cicero's involvement in political causes as justification to use their own classical education for the public good. They did this by serving Florence as diplomats or working in the chancellery office, where official documents were written. They also went beyond Petrarch's achievements by studying a language that had almost been completely lost in Western Europe: classical Greek. The revival of Greek is one of the most important aspects of the Italian Renaissance. It allowed westerners to become acquainted with that part of the classical heritage that had been lost during the Middle Ages -- most significantly the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. In particular, Renaissance writers were fascinated by his belief that ideals such as beauty or truth exist beyond the ability of our senses to recognize them, and that we can train our minds to make use of our ability to reason and thus get beyond the limits imposed by our senses. This positive Platonic view of human potential is found in one of the most famous passages from the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man.
Renaissance humanist scholarship branched out in a number of different directions. Some writers strove to describe the ideal man of the age. In Castiglione's The Courtier, such a person would be a man who knew several languages, was familiar with classical literature, and was also skilled in the arts-what we might label today as a ''Renaissance Man." Johan Huizinga argues that this direction of humanist scholarship represents a “factitious revival of the splendour of chivalry… in [which] the poets and princes imagined that they were returning to antiquity” (59).
Other contributions were made in the new field of critical textual analysis. Lorenzo Valla was one of the critical figures in this area. Working in the Vatican libraries, he realized that languages can tell a history all their own. In 1440, he proved that the Donation of Constantine, a document in which Constantine, the first Christian Emperor turned control of the western half of his empire over to the papacy, could not have been written by Constantine. In another work that influenced the humanists in northern Europe, Valla took his critical techniques to the Vulgate Bible, the standard Latin bible of the Middle Ages, and showed that its author, Jerome, had mistranslated a number of critical passages from the Greek sources.
It is arguably in the area of fine arts that the Renaissance made its most notable contribution to western culture. A number of different factors drove Renaissance art. In a reflection of the shift toward individualism, Renaissance artists now considered themselves to be important individuals in their own right, whereas in the Middle Ages their craft was marked by more anonymity. These artists sought prestige by competing for the patronage of secular individuals such as merchants and bankers, who wanted to sponsor art that would glorify their achievements rather than tout the spiritual message that was at the heart of medieval art. These patrons demanded a more naturalistic style, which was aided by the development of new artistic techniques, including the rejection of the old practice of hierarchical sealing, in which figures in a composition were sized in proportion to their spiritual significance. Perhaps the most important development was in the 1420s with the discovery of single-point perspective, a style in which all elements within a painting converge at a single point in the distance, allowing artists to create more realistic settings for their work.
The end of the fifteenth century marked the beginning of the movement known as the High Renaissance. During the High Renaissance, Rome replaced Florence as the great center of artistic patronage. Florence had experienced a religious backlash against the new style of art, while in Rome a series of popes, most notably Michelangelo's great patron Julius II, were very interested in the arts and sought to beautify their city and their palaces. The High Renaissance lasted until around the 1520s, when art began to move in a different direction.
By the late fifteenth century Italian Renaissance humanism began to affect the rest of Europe. Although the writers of the Italian Renaissance were Christian, they thought less about religious questions than their northern counterparts. In the north, questions concerning religion were paramount. Christianity had arrived in the north later than in the south, and northerners at this time were still seeking ways to reconcile humanism with Christian thought. They believed they could achieve this end by studying early Christian authors. Later, they would ironically find extreme voices of dissent, such as that of Martin Luther, using their methodology to justify the stance that the Church had strayed from the will of God.
Arguably the greatest of the northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus's In Praise of Folly used satire as a means of criticizing what he thought were the problems of the Church. His handbook of the Christian Knight emphasized the idea of inner faith as opposed to the outer forms of worship, such as partaking of the sacraments. Erasmus's Latin translation of the New Testament also played a major role in the sixteenth-century movement to better understand the life of the early Christians through its close textual analysis of the Acts of the Apostles. Erasmus was at first impressed with Luther's attacks on the church and even initiated a correspondence with him. Eventually, however, the two men found that they had significant disagreements. Unlike Luther, Erasmus was committed to reforming the church, not abandoning it, and he could never accept Luther's belief that man does not have free will.
Another important northern humanist was the Englishman Sir Thomas More. A friend of Erasmus, he wrote the classic work Utopia (1516). More, who coined the phrase utopia, which literally means ''nowhere,'' was critical of many aspects of contemporary society and sought to depict a civilization in which political and economic injustices were limited by having all property held in common. More, like Erasmus, was highly critical of certain practices of his church, but in the end he gave his life for his beliefs. In 1534 Henry VIII had More, who was serving the King as his chancellor, executed for refusing to take an oath recognizing Henry as Head of the Church of England.
The Northern Renaissance also represented more than simply the Christian humanism of individuals such as More and Erasmus. Talented painters from the north, while clearly influenced by the artists of the Italian Renaissance with whom they often came into contact on visits to the Italian peninsula, created their own unique style. This is seen, for example, in the work of the draftsman Albrecht Durer, whose woodcuts lent support to the doctrinal revolution brought about by Luther. The greatest achievement in the arts in northern Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century took place in England. Although Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson are both writers of significant repute, the age produced an unrivaled literary genius in William Shakespeare.
The search for new ways to produce text became important in the late medieval period, when the number of literate individuals rose considerably as the number of European universities increased. The traditional method of producing books, via a monk working dutifully in a monastic scriptorium, was clearly unable to meet this heightened demand. Johannes Gutenberg, from the German city of Mainz, was the first to produce books with movable type. Between 1452 and 1453, Gutenberg printed approximately 200 bibles and spent a great deal of money making his bibles as ornate as any handwritten version. The printing press significantly increased literacy in the sixteenth century, and would provide a highly effective ideological vehicle for the Reformation.
The threads running through the Renaissance are so complex and contradictory that, under the attempts of historians to categorize it, the period fails to constitute any sort of identifiable age at all, and so is best described as a continuation of high medieval trends. By isolating the Renaissance from this context, Wallace K. Ferguson writes, “the specialist [historian] may well find himself operating in an historical vacuum, in which the gravity of all objects seems equal.” In supplement to his criticism, Ferguson offers an alternative: “A synthetic interpretation, which includes all aspects of a given civilization, is especially important for its bearing upon the problem of causation, even in the most restricted fields of enquiry” (495). Not only did the characteristic narcissism of the Renaissance allowed for a parochial vision of itself as a distinctive departure from unrelieved barbarism, the bifurcation of the Renaissance in the north and south makes a neat label even less feasible.
Works Cited
Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1990.
Ferguson,Wallace K. "The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis." The Journal of the History of Ideas 12. 1951.
Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. New York: Dover Publications, 1998.
Martin, Alfred von. Sociology of the Renaissance. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Palmer, R.R., Colton, Joel, and Kramer, Lloyd. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.