One view of the Renaissance is represented by the work of nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. In his 1860 German-language book, "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy" , Burckhardt argues that several peculiarly modern characteristics suddenly appear in fifteenth century Italy: an interest in the individual, a curiosity about the natural processes of this world, an increased subjectivity in moral and ethical affairs. But, according to Burckhardt, this first "modern" person needed a guide to help understand the surrounding physical and intellectual world; such a guide was the "ancient civilization" of classical Greece and Rome "with its wealth of truth and knowledge in every spiritual interest. Both the form and the substance of this civilization were adopted [in Renaissance Italy] with admiring gratitude".
But Burckhardt's view of the Italian Renaissance, supported by a number of modern historians like W.K. Ferguson and Hans Baron, has been strongly challenged by other twentieth-century historians as C. H. McIlwain, Lynn Thorndike, and C. H. Haskins (selections from all these historians are excerpted in Dannenfeldt's anthology Renaissance: "Medieval or Modern?"). These opponents of Burckhardt's view point out that the rediscovery of the classical spirit was largely the work of scholastic thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which are usually classified as the Middle Ages. And furthermore, these historians argue, the individualism which Burckhardt characterizes as "renaissance" made its appearance in France and Northern Italy as early as the twelfth century. Readers of the Inferno in Dante's Divine Comedy, which is usually classified as a work of medieval literature, will note that along with its emphasis on otherwordly spirituality and hierarchy, there is also the distinctive Renaissance emphasis on individuality: Dante himself appears as a character, along with the specific details and concerns of his own life (his sorrowful exile, his concern with his ultimate status as a poet); theological details are unabashedly slanted according to Dante's individual values (some Popes are consigned, in Dante's view, to hell; the sins that Dante encounters in the first canto are ordered by his own particular weaknesses, rather than their theological hierarchy that determines the major plateaus of hell); individuals are presented with vivid particularity. The lack of a sharp dividing line between periods, the sense of a gradual emergence of one period from the one preceding, is also suggested in the classification by various scholars of poet Francis Petrarch, anglicization of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), and fiction writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) sometimes as medieval authors, sometimes as Renaissance authors, or sometimes as transitional authors with elements from both periods.
Significantly, Burckhardt's critics do not deny, however, the existence of the Volksgeist (the communal spirit)--the individualism, the scientism, the moral subjectivism--which Burckhardt claims to see in fifteenth century Italy. Indeed, the qualities of Renaissance which Burckhardt proposes are generally accepted -- only the suddenness of their appearance during the Italian Quattrocento (the 1400's) is questioned.
Perhaps the most elemental of the frequently observed differences between Renaissance and Medieval is the conception of the individual in relation to the universe. During the Middle Ages, people characteristically saw themselves as fitting somehow into a hierarchy, each person having a place in some estate or corporate body, united with others in some kind of communion or community, of which the highest was the church. But during the Renaissance (whether twelfth or fifteenth century), individuals tended to see themselves as independent personalities.
Nowhere is this individualism more apparent than in the "portrait" art which flourished during the Quattrocento. Indeed, the portrait painting itself first appears as an artistic genre during this period, though it has antecedents in the distinctive portrait busts of Roman art in the Classical period, so valued in the Renaissance. The individual sitter becomes a subject to be glorified; he or she is frequently placed against more realistic backgrounds, and is thus located in a specific world of time and space. The sitter is represented in living attitudes, with realistic facial expressions revealing personality. In short, for the Renaissance artist, painting becomes less symbolic, less an imitation of general truths, more a portrayal of concrete realities, of individual human beings, as they meet the eye.
The literary magnification in portrait of the individual reaches an early height (in more than one sense), before the thousand-page novelistic depiction of Don Quixote by Cervantes, in Rabelais' novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose heroes are, in all their individuality, zest, virtues, faults, traits, and physiques, quite literally giants. The new spirit of the Renaissance, explicitly opposed to aspects of the Middle Ages, is displayed by Rabelais' overt and consistent attack on the medieval outlook and values, which parallels Cervantes' nostalgic satire on the errantry of the knightly chivalric codes and system of the Middle Ages.
In dramatic art as well, the medieval emphasis on allegorical representation of human "types" diminishes until, in Shakespeare's plays, the individualized human character becomes the legitimate object for study. Hamlet, for instance, which presents a man given the task of avenging his father's murder, can be seen primarily as the psychological portrait of an individual man, torn by doubts, and weak because of his own vacillation. In medieval drama, however, such serious explorations of private human suffering are seldom presented on stage. Instead, in plays like Everyman (written shortly before the close of the fifteenth century), perhaps the best of the "morality" plays, though Everyman "suffers" the disconsolation of finding that his friends (Fellowship, Kindred, Worldly Goods) will not follow him into the next world, he remains essentially a constituent part of a dramatized sermon or homily. Everyman fails to assume the individuality of Hamlet, or of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, or Falstaff, Richard III, or Othello.
Science
Between Columbus' first voyage in 1492 and Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe in 1520 -- less than thirty years after the "discovery" of the New World (the natives, of course, already knew it was there) -- these explorations added to the body of Western humanity's geographic knowledge: in 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded Africa and reached southwest India; travelling totally by sea in 1500, Pedro Cabral claimed Brazil for Portugal; in 1507, Balboa looked on the Pacific Ocean from the isthmus of Panama; by 1509 the Portuguese had reached Malacca, near modern Singapore, from which they passed northward into China and Japan. Such expansion of frontiers underlies Michel De Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals," in which the author speculates on questions that have arisen through the discovery of the New World that is Latin America, as well as the aggregation of written accounts growing up in travelers' tales of new lands. The lover in Donne's "The Good-Morrow" joyously uses the new cartography that has accompanied Renaissance exploration to proclaim union with his beloved: "Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,/ Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown;/ Let us possess one world -- each hath one, and is one."
With this explosion in geographic knowledge came the shattering of the Ptolemaic universe. In his 1543 De Revolutionibus, Polish astronomer Nicholaus Copernicus set out the modern heliocentric (that is, sun-centered) conception of planetary movement. The earth, instead of being the center of the solar system, became just one of the subordinate bodies--and not even the greatest--circling the sun. But, as C. S. Lewis points out, it would be wrong to think that the Copernican system, suddenly, in the middle of the sixteenth century, shattered humanity's sense of cosmic security. As Lewis notes, "Copernicus put forward only a theory: verification, at the hands of Kepler and Galileo, came only at the end of [the sixteenth century]. . . . Even where the new theory was accepted, the change it produced was not of such emotional or imaginative importance as is sometimes supposed"(2). Human beings simply did not suddenly, because of Copernicus, see themselves as small, inconsequential creatures in a world no longer revolving literally and metaphorically around themselves. Indeed, excited interest in these issues is evidenced by both Faustus, in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and Adam, in Milton's Paradise Lost, who are apparently amateur astronomers and display Renaissance inquiring minds about the truth of Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, each one asking a supernatural visitor for the cosmological lowdown.
Though the Copernican theory may have lacked the particular imaginative and emotional impact historians often assign it, Copernicus' discovery was extremely important for the methodological revolution which it encouraged. As C.S. Lewis suggests, by reducing Nature to her mathematical elements, the new scientist "substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colours, smells, ghosts" ( 3). Kepler, who verified Copernicus' original heliocentric theory, early in his career explained the motion of the planets by their animae motrices (moving spirits); before he died, he explained it mechanically.
For the sixteenth-century philosopher/scientist, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), for instance, the world itself and the creatures in it (including human beings) became legitimate objects for study. Bacon himself was a genuine "Renaissance man," earning distinction as jurist, statesman, amateur scientist, and essayist. Where the medieval thinker had been centrally concerned about humanity's knowledge of God and proper relation to that God, the Renaissance scientist--like his modern counterpart--examined the physical world with an eye toward utility. Bacon's Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, for instance, regards the medieval question about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin as sheer folly: "when you descend into the [metaphysical scholars'] distinctions and decisions, instead of a fruitfull wombe for the use and benefit of man's life, they end in monstrous altercations and barking questions". Utility becomes the watchword for the Renaissance scientist who demands to know "how" something works rather than "why" it works.
The desire for utility and usefulness is also reflected in the language which men use to express themselves. Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) articulates the linguistic ideal of the new scientist:
[Members of the Royal Society resolve] to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expression, clear senses; a native easiness; bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can; and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.
So powerfully does science capture the imagination of Renaissance thinkers that the stylistic ideals of scientific language ultimately become standards for poetic expression as well. For writers like Shakespeare or Milton, who stand "outside" science, though Milton was a student of it, and seek to look within the individual's soul, language is richly evocative, metaphoric, associational. For such poets, words cannot entirely contain thoughts, but can serve only as rough approximations of truth. In Paradise Lost, especially, language becomes a tortuous weaving of associations, often syntactically convoluted and ornately reminiscent of the Baroque style of art. However, for writers of the eighteenth century (technically beyond the period called "Renaissance," but the inheritors of the Renaissance scientific world), poetry becomes a means of expressing, with almost scientific exactitude, the most monumental of human thoughts in the most compact of poetic units, the couplet. For Alexander Pope, the tightly structured, perfectly balanced form of the heroic couplet brings to poetry the kind of order and regularity which Newton sought to discover in the natural world.
Religion and the Church
Far from being an era of secular humanism, an oversimplified misconception based on the period's emphasizing the individual and immediately following the "age of faith," as the Middle Ages is sometimes known, the Renaissance in most aspects is a time of Christian or religious humanism. The passion in our time aroused by the issue of abortion was stirred in the Renaissance by religion, which was a burning topic--quite literally, as some in the Reformation and Counter Reformation were burned at the stake, literally scorched by the heated arguments and feelings about what religion was best. While 1492 in the rhyme reminds child and adult about Columbus, we should not forget, as the recent films Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) and 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) remind us, that this year also marks the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the Inquisition, and the forcible imposition of Christianity on Native Americans as part of the period's religious fervor.
The single most unifying force of the medieval world had been the Church, whose authority had served to make medieval Europe, despite differences in geography and national background, a single cultural community. However, during the Renaissance, the medieval community of faith broke apart under the pressure for ecclesiastical and doctrinal reform.
Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, is usually given credit for initiating the Protestant Reformation. In tacking his ninety-five theses on the doors of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, Luther sought to de-emphasize the importance of "good works" in human salvation, since "justification" (rightness with God) came by "faith alone." Luther also reduced the role of the priest in mediating between God and the individual.
But Luther's criticism of the Church in the early sixteenth century was nothing new. Comment on abuses in the Church bulks large in Dante's Inferno, and with a more comic bawdiness in several of the tales of Boccaccio's Decameron. During the Middle Ages, "protestant" reformers had similarly spoken out against the Church. Much of the implicit and explicit criticism of the Church in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is derived from the Lollard movement of John Wycliff, who, anticipating Luther by nearly 150 years, attacked the ecclesiastical structure of the Church by arguing that no "visible church" was needed for salvation and that ordinary people might obtain grace by reading a vernacular Bible, one written not in Latin but in the language of the people. (Both these arguments become integral parts of Luther's reformation as well.)
So the question arises of why Luther's revolt, though it began only as an attempt to reform, succeeded where other, earlier ones had failed.
One answer is simply that sixteenth century Europe was "ready" for reformation--religious, as well as social and political. And Luther's religious reformation came to include more than theological issues. Under the guise of religious zeal, for instance, many reformers sought to effect a kind of Christian communism. One particular zealot, John of Leyden, a Dutch tailor, succeeded briefly in establishing a "reign of saints" in the city of Münster. There he introduced a series of social experiments, including the abolishment of private property, the practice of polygamy, and government by revolutionary council. The selfish indulgence in lavish expenditure within some parts of the Church, both an economic and moral issue, is satirized in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel by the size and costliness of Gargantua's worship paraphernalia before the reforms instituted by his teacher, as well as in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus by Dr. Faustus's slapstick pranks targeting the Pope and papal inner circle amidst sumptuous circumstances, a discomfiting that would have been applauded by the play's English audiences.
In seventeenth-century England, the radicalism of Protestant sectaries contributed to the beheading of Charles I and the "Rule of the Saints" under the Commonwealth government (1648-1658) of Oliver Cromwell. But even Cromwell's relatively conservative, relatively tolerant Protestantism did not satisfy the more radical of the independent sects, and one particular sectarian group, the Fifth monarchists, even resorted to armed violence to secure the Kingdom for the imminent second coming of Christ. Again, in this century Puritan ire is evoked by what is perceived as the Church's extravagance, as suggested in the description in Book II of Paradise Lost of the expensive ornamentalism, not to mention Orientalism (a negative stereotype of Islam, pervading the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the West), of Satan's headquarters, Pandemonium, allusively modeled on St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.
More pragmatic, less idealistic persons also saw in Luther's rebellion a useful tool of political expedience. In England, Henry VIII (of the six wives) used "Protestantism" to divorce himself from Papal control and establish himself as "Protector and Only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England" (1534 Act of Supremacy). Expropriating Church lands and properties in the name of reformed religion, Henry consolidated more power and revenue into his own hands. Similarly, on the continent, the political authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V of Spain, was challenged by Lutheran princes, who, like Henry, often expropriated church property for their own.
Luther's reformation also succeeded because he emphasized the role of the individual believer in a personal salvation, his effort aided by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, which gave, along with early translations of the Bible into the vernacular (discouraged by the Catholic church), individual readers freer access to and private interpretation of the scriptures. This fundamental shift in attitudes from the Catholic past is reflected in several significant differences between Dante's Divine Comedy, that great medieval Catholic epic of man's progress toward salvation, and Milton's Paradise Lost, that Protestant epic of man's original sin and departure from Eden. Dante, the traveler into the Other World, has Virgil (who represents Reason) for his spiritual guide through both the Inferno and the Purgatorio, and Beatrice (who represents Divine Grace) as his guide through the Paradiso. Not for a single step of the journey is Dante left without one of these guides. Milton's Adam and Eve, on the other hand, are alone in Paradise. It is true that they are forewarned by divine messengers that Satan is present in the Garden, but they are left alone before the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to make their fatal decision. Significantly, human "Reason" cannot help Adam and Eve to make choices in Eden. As Milton's detractors point out, Adam and Eve possess no knowledge of evil and therefore cannot "know" the consequences of their act (though they have been told). But that is Milton's point: the motivation for their obedience is not to be their intellectual disposition nor their fear of punishment. They are to obey because they have faith in the God who has instructed them not to eat; they are individually responsible for their moral and ethical behavior, but the basis for their behavior is to be their faith, their inward trust in God.
For many sixteenth-century Europeans, the Roman Catholic Church seemed in particular need of reform. Excesses of churchmen were commonplace. For men like Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who sold indulgences to finance the building of St. Peter's in Rome, salvation became a thing to be bartered and sold like so many sacks of flour. Chaucer's Summoner and Pardoner, as well as Boccaccio's Brother Alberto (in the Second Tale, Fourth Day, of The Decameron), represent this corruption. Luther's religious ideas, which made salvation a matter of grace in faith rather than a financial transaction, struck a particularly sympathetic chord among a number of religious idealists of the age. The most notable of these idealists was John Calvin, who agreed with most of Luther's criticisms of the Church. But Calvin viewed fundamental human nature as even more depraved than did Luther. So weakened by sin were individuals, argued Calvin, that they could not by their own efforts achieve righteousness with God. Rather, humanity was dependent upon God's predestining some individuals to election (heaven) and others to damnation. This Calvinist idea of predestination (predetermination) did not, as might be supposed, produce complacency in the individual believer. Instead, the idea of predestination often produced people intolerantly and militantly convinced they possessed the Right.
Following Luther's Reformation, and as a result of the Protestant emphasis on the individual's relationship with God, a wave of intense religious introspection swept over Europe during the sixteenth century.
In Germany, where the Protestant movement began, this introspection paralleled a marked increase in the suicide rate. People seemed to look within themselves, discover that which was ugly and despicable in human nature, and despaired of God's mercy being extended to them. While the Protestant "theology" provided individuals greater freedom from spiritual restraint, it also placed greater responsibility on them to look within themselves for evidence of their own election. Most major authors of Western world literature at this time have a religious strand running through their writings. Other than the writers already mentioned in this regard (Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Milton), examples would include the speaker in Petrarch's sonnets, who finds himself torn between religion and romantic love; Folly in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, who with wise foolishness praises the Christian Fool, following the lead of St. Paul in his epistles; Gargantua and Pantagruel, who have their education bracketed within a Christian, religious framework; Cervantes' Don Quixote, who thinks of his mission in virtually messianic terms (and medieval knights did think of themselves as acting for God as well as king), and is led to the inn where he will be dubbed knight by a star; Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, who is torn between the individual's desire for transcendence and humble acceptance of God's laws; Shakespeare's Hamlet, who is troubled about whether the supernatural apparition of his dead father is angelic or demonic; and Donne's speaker in the Holy Sonnets, who meditatively finds solace in religion. Even in the more secular-oriented works of Montaigne, Castiglione, and Machiavelli this concern emerges. The skeptical Montaigne in "Of Cannibals" implies satiric criticism of contemporary European clergy who evade accountability by their flock, in contrast (ironically) to the "pagan" priests of the cannibals; Castiglione notes that the perfection of the palace of the Duke of Urbino features in its library the scriptures in the original Hebrew and Greek tongues; and Machiavelli in the last chapter of The Prince hopes for a leader who will combine the best of both the Classical and Judeo-Christian traditions.
Available in http://www.aug.edu/langlitcom/humanitiesHBK/handbook_htm/renaissance_intro1.htm, edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa
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