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RENAISSANCE, THE

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Originally appearing in Volume V23, Page 93 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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RENAISSANCE, THE .—The " Renaissance " or " Renascence " is a See also:term used to indicate a well-known but indefinite space of See also:time and a certain phase in the development of See also:Europe.' On the one See also:hand it denotes the transition from that See also:period of See also:history which we See also:call the See also:middle ages (q.v.) to that which we call See also:modern. On the other hand it implies those changes in the intellectual and moral attitude of the Western nations by which the transition was characterized. If we insist upon the literal and etymological meaning of the word, the Renaissance was a re-See also:birth; and it is needful to inquire of what it was the re-birth. The See also:metaphor of Renaissance may signify the entrance of the See also:European nations upon a fresh See also:stage of vital See also:energy in See also:general, implying a See also:fuller consciousness and a freer exercise of faculties than had belonged to the See also:medieval period. Or it may mean the resuscitation of simply intellectual activities, stimulated by the revival of See also:antique learning and its application to the arts and literatures of modern peoples. Upon our choice between these two interpretations of the word depend important See also:differences in any treatment of the subject. The former has the disadvantage of making it difficult to See also:separate the Renaissance from other See also:historical phases—the See also:Reformation, for example—with which it ought not to be confounded. The latter has the merit of assigning a specific name to a limited See also:series of events and See also:group of facts, which can be distinguished for the purpose of See also:analysis from other events and facts with which they are intimately but not indissolubly connected. In other words, the one See also:definition of Renaissance makes it denote the whole See also:change which came over Europe at the See also:close of the middle ages. The other confines it to what was known by our ancestors as the Revival of Learning. Yet, when we concentrate See also:attention on the recovery of antique culture, we become aware that this was only one phenomenon or symptom of a far wider and more comprehensive alteration in the conditions of the European races. We find it needful to retain both terms, Renaissance and Revival of Learning, and ' For a somewhat different view of the parcelling out into such periods, see the See also:article MIDDLE AGES.to show the relations between the series of events and facts which they severally imply.

The Revival of Learning must be regarded as a See also:

function of that vital energy, an See also:organ of that See also:mental See also:evolution, which brought into existence the modern See also:world, with its new conceptions of See also:philosophy and See also:religion, its reawakened arts and sciences, its firmer grasp on the realities of human nature and the world, its manifold inventions and discoveries, its altered See also:political systems, its expansive and progressive forces. Important as the Revival of Learning undoubtedly was, there are essential factors in the complex called the Renaissance with which it can but remotely be connected. When we analyse the whole group of phenomena which have to be considered, we perceive that some of the most essential have nothing or little to do with the recovery of the See also:classics. These are, briefly speaking, the decay of those See also:great fabrics, See also:church and See also:empire, which ruled the middle ages both as ideas and as realities; the development of nationalities and See also:languages; the enfeeblement of the feudal See also:system throughout Europe; the invention and application of See also:paper, the mariner's See also:compass, See also:gunpowder, and See also:printing; the exploration of continents beyond the ocean; and the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of See also:astronomy. Europe in fact had been prepared for a thorough-going See also:metamorphosis before that new ideal of human See also:life and culture which the Revival of Learning brought to See also:light had been made See also:manifest. It had recovered from the confusion consequent upon the See also:dissolution of the See also:ancient See also:Roman empire. The See also:Teutonic tribes had been Christianized, civilized and assimilated to the previously Latinized races over whom they exercised the authority of conquerors. See also:Comparative tranquillity and material comfort had succeeded to discord and rough living. Modern nationalities, defined as separate factors in a See also:common system, were ready to co-operate upon the basis of European federation. The ideas of universal See also:monarchy and of indivisible Christendom, incorporated in the See also:Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Church, had so far lost their hold that See also:scope was offered for the introduction of new theories both of See also:state and church which would have seemed visionary or impious to the medieval mind. It is therefore obvious that some term, wider than Revival of Learning, descriptive of the change which began to pass over Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, has to be adopted. That of Renaissance, Rinascimento, or Renascence is sufficient for the purpose, though we have to guard against the tyranny of what is after all a metaphor.

We must not suffer it to See also:

lead us into See also:rhetoric about the deadness and the darkness of the middle ages, or hamper our inquiry with preconceived assumptions that the re-birth in question was in any true sense a return to the irrecoverable See also:pagan past. Nor must we imagine that there was any abrupt break with the middle ages. On the contrary, the Renaissance was rather the last stage of the middle ages, emerging from ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what was See also:original in medieval ideas by the light of classic arts and letters, holding in itself the promise of the modern world. It was therefore a period and a See also:process of transition, See also:fusion, preparation, tentative endeavour. And just at this point the real importance of the Revival of Learning may be indicated. That rediscovery of the classic past restored the confidence in their own faculties to men striving after spiritual freedom; revealed the continuity of history and the identity of human nature in spite of diverse See also:creeds and different customs; held up for emulation See also:master-See also:works of literature, philosophy and See also:art; provoked inquiry; encouraged See also:criticism; shattered the narrow mental barriers imposed by medieval orthodoxy. See also:Humanism, a word which will often recur in the ensuing paragraphs, denotes a specific See also:bias which the forces liberated in the Renaissance took from contact with the ancient world,—the particular See also:form assumed by human self-esteem at that See also:epoch,—the ideal of life and See also:civilization evolved by the modern nations. It indicates the endeavour of See also:man to reconstitute himself as a See also:free being, not as the See also:thrall of theological despotism, and the See also:peculiar assistance he derived in this effort from See also:Greek and Roman literature, the litterae humaniores, letters leaning rather to the See also:side of man than of divinity. In this article the Renaissance will be considered as implying a comprehensive See also:movement of the European See also:intellect and will Method toward self-emancipation, toward reassertion of the of treat- natural rights of the See also:reason and the senses, toward See also:meat. the See also:conquest of this See also:planet as a See also:place of human occupation, and toward the formation of regulative theories both for states and individuals differing from those of medieval times. The Revival of Learning will be treated as a decisive See also:factor in this process of evolution on a new See also:plan. To exclude the Reformation and the See also:Counter-Reformation wholly from the survey is impossible. These terms indicate moments in the whole process of modern history which were opposed, each to the other, and both to the Renaissance; and it is needful to See also:bear in mind that they have, scientifically speaking, a quite separate existence.

Yet if the history of Europe in the 16th See also:

century of our era came to be written with the brevity with which we write the history of Europe in the 6th century B.C., it would be difficult at the distance of time implied by that supposition to distinguish the See also:Italian movement of the Renaissance in its origin from the See also:German movement of the Reformation. Both would be seen to have a common starting-point in the reaction against See also:long dominant ideas which were becoming obsolete, and also in the excitation of faculties which had during the same period been accumulating energy. The Renaissance, if we try to regard it. as a period, was essentially the transition from one historical stage to another. It cannot Chem- therefore be confined within strict See also:chronological limits. ChCron There is one date, however, which may be remembered logical See also:mite. with See also:advantage as the starting-point in time of the Re- naissance, after the departure from the middle ages had been definitely and consciously made by the Italians. This is the See also:year 1453, when See also:Constantinople, chosen for his See also:capital by the first See also:Christian See also:emperor of See also:Rome, See also:fell into the hands of the Turk. One of the survivals of the old world, the See also:shadow of what had been the Eastern Empire, now passed suddenly away. Almost at the same date that visionary revival of the Western Empire, which had imposed for six centuries upon the See also:imagination of medieval Europe, hampering See also:Italy and impeding the consolidation of See also:Germany, ceased to reckon among political actualities; while its more robust See also:rival, the Roman Church, seemed likely to sink into the See also:rank of a See also:petty Italian principality. It was demonstrated by the destruction of the Eastern and the dotage of the Western Empire, and by the new papal policy which See also:Nicholas V. inaugurated, that the old See also:order of society was about to be superseded. Nothing remained to check those centrifugal forces in state and church which substituted a See also:confederation of rival European See also:powers for the earlier ideal of universal monarchy, and separate religious constitutions for the previous See also:Catholic unity. At the same time the new learning introduced by the earlier humanists awakened free thought, encouraged curiosity, and prepared the best minds of Europe for speculative audacities from which the schoolmen would have shrunk, and which soon expressed themselves in acts of See also:cosmopolitan importance. If we look a little forward to the years 1492-1500, we obtain a second date of great importance.

In these years the expedition of See also:

Charles VIII. to See also:Naples opened Italy to See also:French, See also:Spanish and German interference. The leading nations of Europe began to compete for the See also:prize of the See also:peninsula, and learned meanwhile that culture which the Italians had perfected. In these years the secularization of the papacy was carried to its final point by See also:Alexander VI., and the Reformation became inevitable. The same period was marked by the See also:discovery of See also:America, the exploration of the See also:Indian seas, and the consolidation of the Spanish See also:nationality. It also witnessed the application of printing to the See also:diffusion of knowledge. Thus, speaking roughly, the See also:half-century between 1450 and 1 00 may be termed the culminating point of the Renaissance. The transition from the medieval to the modern order was now secured if not accomplished, and a See also:Rubicon had been crossed from which no retrogression to the past was possible. Looking yet a little farther, to the years 1527 and 1530, a third decisive date is reached. In the first of these years happened the See also:sack of Rome, in the second the pacification of Italy by Charles V. under a Spanish See also:hegemony. The See also:age of the Renaissance was now closed for the See also:land which gave it birth. The Reformation had taken See also:firm hold on See also:northern Europe. The Counter-Reformation was already imminent.

It must not be imagined that so great a change as that implied by the Renaissance was accomplished without premonitory precut. symptoms and previous endeavours. In the See also:

main sors of we mean by it the recovery of freedom for the human the Re- spirit after a long period of bondage to oppressive neissance. ecclesiastical and political orthodoxy—a return to the liberal and See also:practical conceptions of the world which the nations of antiquity had enjoyed, but upon a new and enlarged See also:platform. This being so, it was inevitable that the finally successful efforts after self-emancipation should have been anticipated from time to time by strivings within the ages that are known as dark and medieval. It is therefore See also:part of the See also:present inquiry to pass in See also:review some of the claimants to be considered precursors of the Renaissance. First of all must be named the See also:Frank in whose lifetime the dual conception of universal empire and universal church, divinely appointed, sacred and inviolable, began to See also:control the order of European society. Charles the Great (See also:Charlemagne) See also:lent his forces to the plan of resuscitating the Roman empire at a moment when his own See also:power made him'the arbiter of western Europe, when the papacy needed his See also:alliance, and when the Eastern Empire had passed under the usurped regency of a See also:female. He modelled an empire, Roman in name but essentially, Teutonic, since it owed such substance as its fabric possessed to Frankish armies and the sinews of the German See also:people. As a structure composed of See also:divers See also:ill-connected parts it fell to pieces at its builder's See also:death, leaving little but the See also:incubus of a memory, the See also:fascination of a mighty name, to dominate the mind of medieval Europe. As an See also:idea, the empire See also:grew in visionary power, and remained one of the See also:chief obstacles in the way of both Italian and German See also:national coherence. Real force was not in it, but rather in that counterpart to its unlimited pretensions, the church, which had evolved it from See also:barbarian See also:night, and which used her own more vital energies for undermining the rival of her creation. Charles the Great, having proclaimed himself successor of the Caesars, was obscurely ambitious of imitating the See also:Augusti also in the See also:sphere of letters. He caused a See also:scheme of humanistic See also:education to be formulated, and gave employment at his See also:court to rhetoricians, of whom See also:Alcuin was the most considerable.

But very little came of the revival of learning which Charles is supposed to have encouraged; and the empire he restored was accepted by the medieval intellect in a crudely theological and vaguely mystical spirit. We should, however, here remember that the study of Roman See also:

law, which was one important precursory symptom of the Renaissance, owed much to medieval respect for the empire as a divine institution. This, together with the municipal Italian intolerance of the Lombard and Frankish codes, kept alive the practice and revived the See also:science of Latin See also:jurisprudence at an See also:early period. Philosophy had attempted to free itself from the trammels of theological orthodoxy in the See also:hardy speculations of some schoolmen, notably of Scotus See also:Erigena and See also:Abelard. These innovators found, however, small support, and were defeated by Specula-opponents who used the same logical weapons with auth- ti" "d ority to back them. Nor were the rationalistic opinions See also:heresy in of the Averroists without their value, though the church the middle condemned these deviators from her discipline as heretics. ages' Such medieval materialists, moreover, had but feeble hold upon the substance of real knowledge. Imperfect acquaintance with authors whom they studied in Latin See also:translations made by See also:Jews from Arabic commentaries on Greek texts, together with almost See also:total See also:ignorance of natural See also:laws, condemned them to sterility. Like the other schiomachists of their epoch, they fought with phantoms in a visionary See also:realm. A similar See also:judgment may be passed upon those Paulician, Albigensian, Paterine and Epicurean dissenters from the Catholic creed who opposed the phalanxes of orthodoxy with frail imaginative weapons, and alarmed established orders in the state by the audacity of their communistic opinions. See also:Physical science struggled into feeble life in the cells of See also:Gerbert and See also:Roger See also:Bacon. But these men were accounted magicians by the vulgar; and, while the one eventually assumed the See also:tiara, the other was incarcerated in a See also:dungeon. The See also:schools meanwhile resounded still to the interminable dispute upon abstractions.

Are only universals real, or has each name a corresponding entity? From the midst of the See also:

Franciscans who had persecuted Roger Bacon because he presumed to know more than was consistent with human humility arose See also:John of See also:Parma, adopting and popularizing the mystic prophecy of See also:Joachim of See also:Flora. The reign of the See also:Father is past; the reign of the Son is passing; the reign of the Spirit is at hand. Such was the See also:formula of the Eternal See also:Gospel, which, as an unconscious forecast of the Renaissance, has attracted retrospective students by its felicity of See also:adaptation to their historical method. Yet we must remember that this bold See also:intuition of the See also:abbot Joachim indicated a monastic reaction against the tyrannies and corruptions of the church, rather than a fertile philosophical conception. The See also:Fraticelli spiritualists, and similar sects who fed their imagination with his See also:doctrine, expired in the flames to which Fra Dolcino Longino and Margharita were consigned. To what extent the accusations of profligate morals brought against these reforming sectarians were justified remains doubtful; and the same uncertainty rests upon the alleged iniquities of the See also:Templars. It is only certain that at this epoch the fabric of Catholic faith was threatened with various forms of prophetic and See also:Oriental See also:mysticism, symptomatic of a widespread See also:desire to grasp at something simpler, purer and less rigid than Latin See also:theology afforded. Devoid of criticism, devoid of See also:sound learning, devoid of a firm hold on the realities of life, these heresies passed away without solid results and were forgotten. We are too See also:apt to take for granted that the men of the middle ages were immersed in meditations on the other world, and that their Natural- intellectual exercises were confined to abstractions of the ism in schools, hallucinations of the See also:fancy, allegories, visions. medieval This See also:assumption applies indeed in a broad sense to that life and period which was dominated by intolerant theology and literature. deprived of See also:positive knowledge. Yet there are abundant signs that the native human instincts, the natural human appetites, remained unaltered and alive beneath the crust of orthodoxy.

In the See also:

person of a See also:pope like See also:Boniface VIII. those ineradicable forces of the natural man assumed, if we may See also:trust the depositions of ecclesiastics well acquainted with his life, a form of brutal atheistic cynicism. In the person of an emperor, See also:Frederick II., they emerged under the more agreeable garb of liberal culture and Epicurean See also:scepticism. Frederick dreamed of remodelling society upon a mundane type, which anticipated the large See also:toleration and cosmopolitan enlightenment of the actual Renaissance. But his efforts were defeated by the unrelenting hostility of the church, and by the incapacity of his contemporaries to understand his aims. After being forced in his lifetime to submit to authority, he was consigned by See also:Dante to See also:hell. Frederick's ideal of civilization was derived in a large measure from See also:Provence, where a beautiful culture had prematurely bloomed, filling See also:southern Europe with the perfume of See also:poetry and See also:gentle living. Here, if anywhere, it seemed as though the ecclesiastical and 'feudal fetters of the middle ages might be broken, and humanity might enter on a new stage of joyous unimpeded evolution. This was, however, not to be. The church preached See also:Simon de See also:Montfort's crusade, and organized See also:Dominic's See also:Inquisition; what See also:Quinet calls the " Renaissance sociale See also:par I'Amour " was extirpated by See also:sword, See also:fire, See also:famine and pestilence. Meanwhile the Provencal poets had See also:developed their modern See also:language with incomparable richness and dexterity, creating forms of See also:verse and modes of emotional expression which determined the latest medieval phase of literature in Europe. The See also:naturalism of which we have been speaking found free utterance now in the fabliaux of jongleurs, lyrics of See also:minnesingers, tales of trouveres, romances of See also:Arthur and his knights—compositions varied in type and See also:tone, but in all of which sincere See also:passion and real enjoyment of life See also:pierce through'the thin See also:veil of chivalrous mysticism or of See also:allegory with which they were sometimes conventionally draped. The tales of See also:Lancelot and Tristram, the lives of the troubadours and the Wachtlieder of the minnesingers, sufficiently prove with what sensual freedom a See also:knight loved the See also:lady whom See also:custom and art made him profess to See also:worship as a See also:saint.

We do not need to be reminded that See also:

Beatrice's adorer had a wife and See also:children, or that Laura's poet owned a son and daughter by a concubine, in order to perceive that the mystic passion of See also:chivalry was compatible in the middle ages with See also:commonplace See also:matrimony or vulgar illegitimate connexions. But perhaps the most convincing testimony to the presence of this ineradicable naturalism is affordedthy the Latin songs of wandering students, known as Carmina Baratta, written by the self-styled C liardic Goliardi. In these compositions, remarkable for their poetry. facile handling of medieval Latin rhymes and rhythms, the allegorizing mysticism which envelops chivalrous poetry is discarded. Love is treated from a frankly carnal point of view. Bacchus and See also:Venus go hand in hand, as in the ancient ante-Christian age. The open-See also:air enjoyments of the See also:wood, the See also:field, the See also:dance upon the See also:village See also:green, are sung with juvenile lightheartedness. No See also:grave See also:note, warning us that the pleasures of this See also:earth are fleeting, that the visible world is but a See also:symbol of the invisible, that human life is a See also:probation for the life beyond, interrupts the tinkling See also:music as of See also:castanets and tripping feet which gives a novel See also:charm to these unique See also:relics of the 13th century. Goliardic poetry is further curious as showing how the classics even at that early period were a See also:fountain-See also:head of pagan See also:inspiration. In the taverns and See also:low places of amusement haunted by those lettered songsters, on the open road and in the forests trodden by their vagrant feet, the deities of See also:Greece and Rome were not in See also:exile, but at See also:home within the See also:hearts of living men. Thus, while Christendom was still preoccupied with the See also:Crusades, two main forces of the Renaissance, naturalism and See also:enthusiasm for antique modes of feeling, already brought their latent potency to light, prematurely indeed and precociously, yet with a promise that was destined to be kept. When due regard is paid to these See also:miscellaneous evidences of intellectual and sensual freedom during the middle ages, it will be Medieval seen that there were by no means lacking elements of aft/See also:tulle native vigour ready to burst forth. What was wanting of nude was not vitality and See also:licence, not audacity of See also:speculation, See also:salad.

not lawless See also:

instinct or rebellious impulse. It was rather the right See also:touch on life, the right feeling for human See also:independence, the right way of approaching the materials of philosophy, religion, scholarship and literature, that failed. The courage that is See also:born of knowledge, the See also:calm strength begotten by a positive attitude of mind, See also:face to face with the dominant over-shadowing See also:Sphinx of theology, were lacking. We may fairly say that natural and untaught people had more of the just intuition that was needed than learned folk trained in the schools. But these people were rendered licentious in revolt or impotent for salutary See also:action by ignorance, by terror, by uneasy dread of the See also:doom declared for heretics and rebels. Themassive vengeance of the church hung over them, like a heavy sword suspended in the cloudy air. Superstition and stupidity hedged them in on every side, so that sorcery and magic seemed the only means of winning power over nature or insight into mysteries surrounding human life. The path from darkness to light was lost; thought was involved in allegory; the study of nature had been perverted into an inept system of See also:grotesque and pious See also:parable-mongering; the pursuit of truth had become a See also:game of wordy dialectics. The other world, with its imagined See also:heaven and hell. haunted the See also:conscience like a nightmare. However sweet this world seemed, however See also:fair the flesh, both world and flesh were theoretically given over to the See also:devil. It was not See also:worth while to master and economize the resources of this earth, to utilize the See also:good and ameliorate the evils of this life, while every one agreed, in theory at any See also:rate, that the present was but a See also:bad prelude to an infinitely worse or infinitely better future. To See also:escape from these preoccupations and prejudices except upon the path of conscious and deliberate See also:sin was impossible for all but minds of rarest quality and courage; and these were too often reduced to the recantation of their supposed errors no less by some See also:secret clinging sense of See also:guilt than by the church's See also:iron hand.

Man and the actual universe kept on reasserting their rights and claims, announcing their goodliness and delightfulness, in one way or another; but they were always being thrust back again into Cimmerian regions of abstractions, See also:

fictions, visions, spectral hopes and fears, in the midst of which the intellect somnambulistically moved upon an unknown way. At this point the Revival of Learning intervened to determine the course of the Renaissance. Medieval students possessed a considerable portion of the Latin classics, though Italy—the Greek had become in the fullest sense of the phrase Revival of a dead language. But what they retained of ancient Learning. literature they could not comprehend in the right spirit. Between them and the See also:text of poet or historian hung a veil of mysticism, a vapour of misapprehension. The odour of unsanctity clung around those relics of the pagan past. Men bred in the See also:cloister and the lecture-See also:room of the logicians, trained in scholastic disputations, versed in allegorical interpretations of the plainest words and most apparent facts, could not find the See also:key which might unlock those stores of See also:wisdom and of beauty. See also:Petrarch first opened a new method in scholarship, and revealed what we denote as humanism. In his teaching See also:lay the twofold discovery of man and of the world. For humanism, which was the vital See also:element in the Revival of Learning, consists mainly of a just See also:perception of the dignity of man as a rational, volitional and sentient being, born upon this earth with a right to use it and enjoy it. Humanism implied the rejection of those visions of a future and imagined state of souls as the only See also:absolute reality, which had fascinated the imagination of the middle ages. It involved a vivid recognition of the goodliness of man and nature, displayed in the great monuments of human power recovered from the past.

It stimulated the curiosity of latent sensibilities, provoked fresh inquisition into the groundwork of existence, and strengthened man's self-esteem by knowledge of what men had thought and See also:

felt and done in ages when See also:Christianity was not. It roused a desire to reappropriate the whole abandoned provinces of mundane energy, and a See also:hope to emulate antiquity in works of living loveliness and vigour. The Italians of the 14th century, more precocious than the other European races, were ripe for this emancipation of enslaved intelligence. In the classics they found the See also:food which was required to nourish the new spirit; and a variety of circumstances, among which must be reckoned the See also:pride of a nation boasting of its descent from the Populus See also:Romanus, rendered them apt to fling aside the obstacles that had impeded the free action of the mind through many centuries. Petrarch not only set his countrymen upon the right method of studying the Latin classics, but he also divined the importance of recovering a knowledge of Greek literature. To this task See also:Boccaccio addressed himself; and he was followed by numerous Italian enthusiasts, who visited See also:Byzantium before its fall as the sacred See also:city of a new See also:revelation. The next step was to collect See also:MSS., to See also:hunt out, copy and preserve the See also:precious relics of the past. In this See also:work of See also:accumulation See also:Guarino and See also:Filelfo, See also:Aurispa and See also:Poggio, took the chief part, aided by the See also:wealth of Italian See also:patricians, See also:merchant-princes and despots, who were inspired by the sacred thirst for learning. Learning was then no See also:mere pursuit of a See also:special and recluse class. It was fashionable and it was passionate, pervading all society with the fervour of See also:romance. For a See also:generation nursed in decadent See also:scholasticism and stereotyped theological formulae it was the fountain of renascent youth, beauty and freedom, the shape in which the See also:Helen of art and poetry appeared to the ravished eyes of medieval Faustus. It was the resurrection of the mightiest See also:spirits of the past.

" I go," said Cyriac of See also:

Ancona, the indefatigable though uncritical explorer of antiquities, " I go to awake the dead!" This was the enthusiasm, this the vitalizing faith, which made the work of scholarship in the 15th century so highly strung and ardent. The men who followed it knew that they were restoring humanity to its birthright after the See also:expatriation of ten centuries. They were instinctively aware that the effort was for See also:liberty of action, thought and conscience in the future. This conviction made See also:young men leave their loves and pleasures, grave men quit their counting-houses, churchmen See also:desert their missals, to See also:crowd the lecture-rooms cf philologers and rhetoricians. When Greek had been acquired, MSS. accumulated, See also:libraries and museums formed, came the age of printers and expositors. Aldus See also:Manutius in Italy, See also:Froben in See also:Basel, the Rtiennes in See also:Paris, committed to the See also:press what the investigators had recovered. Nor were there wanting men who dedicated their powers to See also:Hebrew and Oriental erudition, laying, together with the Grecians, a basis for those Biblical studies which advanced the Reformation. Meanwhile the languages of Greece and Rome had been so thoroughly appropriated that a final See also:race of scholars, headed by See also:Politian, Pontano, See also:Valla, handled once again in verse and See also:prose both antique dialects, and thrilled the ears of Europe with new-made pagan melodies. The church itself at this epoch lent its See also:influence to the prevalent enthusiasm. Nicholas V. and See also:Leo X., not to mention intervening popes who showed themselves tolerant of humanistic culture, were heroes of the classical revival. See also:Scholar-See also:ship became the surest path of See also:advancement to ecclesiastical and political honours. Italy was one great school of the new learning at the moment when the German, French and Spanish nations were invited to her feast.

It will be well to describe briefly, but in detail, what this See also:

meeting of the modern with the ancient mind effected over the Nature of whole field of intellectual interests. In doing so, we Italian must be careful to remember that the study of the human- classics did but give a special impulse to pent-up ism. energies which were See also:bound in one way or another to assert their independence. Without the Revival of Learning the direction of those forces would have been different; but that novel intuition into the nature of the world and man which constitutes what we describe as Renaissance must have emerged. As the facts, however, stand before us, it is impossible to dissociate the rejection of the other world as the See also:sole reality, the joyous See also:acceptance of this world as a place to live and See also:act in, the conviction that " the proper study of mankind is magi," from humanism. Humanism, as it actually appeared in Italy, was positive in its conception of the problems to be solved, pagan in its contempt for medieval mysticism, invigorated for sensuous enjoyment by contact with antiquity, yet holding in itself the germ of new religious aspirations, profounder science and sterner probings of the mysteries of life than had been attempted even by the ancients. The operation of this humanistic spirit has now to be traced. It is obvious that Italian literature owed little at the outset to the Revival of Learning. The Divine See also:Comedy, the Canzoniere Re/anon and the Decameron were works of monumental art, °f Dante' deriving neither form nor inspiration immediately from of Dante , the classics, but applying the originality of Italian See also:genius Boccaccio to See also:matter See also:drawn from previous medieval See also:sources. Dante and See also:villa"' showed both in his epic poem and in his lyrics that he to the had not abandoned the sphere of contemporary thought. Revival of Allegory and theology, the See also:vision and the symbol, still Learning. determine the form of masterpieces which for perfection of workmanship and for emancipated force of intellect rank among the highest products of the human mind. Yet they are not medieval in the same sense as the See also:song of See also:Roland or the Arthurian See also:cycle. They proved that, though Italy came See also:late into the realm of literature, her action was destined to be decisive and alterative by the introduction of a new spirit, a firmer and more positive grasp on life and aft.

These qualities she owed to her material prosperity, to her freedom from See also:

feudalism, to her secularized church, her commercial See also:nobility, her political independence in a federation of small states. Petrarch and Boccaccio, though they both held the medieval doctrine that literature should See also:teach some abstruse truth beneath a veil of fiction, differed from Dante in this that their poetry and prose in the See also:vernacular abandoned both allegory and symbol. In their practice they ignored their theory. Petrarch's lyrics continue the Provencal tradition as it had been reformed in See also:Tuscany, with a subtler and more modern analysis of emotion, a purer and more chastened See also:style, than his masters could boast. Boccaccio's tales, in like manner, continue the tradition of the fabliaux, raising that See also:literary See also:species to the rank of finished art, enriching it with See also:humour and strengthening its substance by keen insight into all varieties of See also:character. The Canzoniere and the Decameron distinguish themselves from medieval literature, not by any return to classical precedents, but by free self-conscious handling of human nature. So much had to be premised in order to make it clear in what relation humanism stood to the Renaissance, since the Italian work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio is sufficient to indicate the re-birth of the spirit after ages of apparent deadness. Had the Revival of Learning not intervened it is probable that the vigorous efforts of these writers alone would have inaugurated a new age of European culture. Yet, while noting this See also:reservation of judgment, it must also be remarked that all' three felt themselves under some peculiar See also:obligation to the classics. Dante, medieval as his See also:temper seems to us, See also:chose See also:Virgil for his See also:guide, and ascribed his mastery of style to the study of Virgilian poetry. Petrarch and Boccaccio were, as we have seen, the pioneers of the new learning. They held their writings in the vernacular cheap, and initiated that contempt for the See also:mother See also:tongue which was a note of the earlier Renaissance.

Giovanni See also:

Villani, the first chronicler who used Italian for the compilation of a methodical history, tells us how he was impelled to write by musing on the ruins of Rome and thinking of the vanished greatness of the Latin race. We have therefore to recognize that the four greatest writers of the 14th century, while the Revival of Learning was yet in its See also:cradle, each after his own See also:fashion acknowledged the vivifying touch upon their spirit of the antique genius. They seem to have been conscious that they could not give the desired impulse to modern literature and art without contact with the classics; and, in spite of the splendour of their achievements in Italian, they found no immediate followers upon that path. The fascination of pure study was so powerful, the Italians at that epoch were so eager to recover the past, that during the 15th century we have before our eyes the spectacle of this great Relation nation deviating from the course of development begun ofhuman. in poetry by Dante and Petrarch, in prose by Boccaccio ism to and Villani, into the channels of scholarship and See also:anti- scholarquarian See also:research. The language of the Canzoniere and ship and Decameron was abandoned for revived Latin and dis- literature. covered Greek. Acquisition supplanted invention; See also:imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The energies of the Italian people were devoted to transcribing codices, settling texts, translating Greek books into Latin, compiling grammars, commentaries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, epitomes and ephemerides. During this century the best histories —See also:Bruno's and Poggio's See also:annals of See also:Florence, for example—were composed in Latin after the manner of See also:Livy. The best See also:dissertations, Landino's Camaldunenses, Valla'sDe Voluptate, were laboured imitations of See also:Cicero's Tusculans. The best verses, Pontano's elegies, Politian's hexameters, were in like manner Latin; public orations upon ceremonial occasions were delivered in the Latin tongue; See also:correspondence, See also:official and See also:familiar, was carried on in the same language; even the fabliaux received, in Poggio's Facetiae. a See also:dress of elegant Latinity. The noticeable barrenness of Italian literature at this period is referable to the fact that men of genius and See also:talent devoted themselves to erudition and struggled to See also:express their thoughts and feelings in a speech which was not natural. Yet they were engaged in a work of incalculable importance.

At the close of the century the knowledge of Greece and Rome had been reappropriated and placed beyond the possibility of destruction; the chasm between the old and new world had been bridged; medieval modes of thinking and discussing had been superseded; the See also:

staple of education, the common culture which has brought all Europe into intellectual agreement, was already in existence. Humanism was now an actuality. Owing to the uncritical veneration for antiquity which then prevailed, it had received a strong See also:tincture of pedantry. Its professors, in their revolt against the middle ages, made light of Christianity and paraded paganism. What was even worse from an See also:artistic point of view, they had contracted puerilities of style, vanities of rhetoric, stupidities of wearisome See also:citation. Still, at the opening of the 16th century, it became manifest what fruits of See also:noble quality the Revival of Letters was about to bring forth for modern literature. Two great scholars, Lorenzo de' See also:Medici and Politian, had already returned to the practice of Italian poetry. Their work is the first absolutely modern work,—modern in the sense of having absorbed the stores of classic learning and reproduced those treasures in forms of See also:simple, natural, native beauty. See also:Boiardo occupies a similar position by the fusion of classic See also:mythology with chivalrous romance in his Orlando Innarnorato. But the See also:victor's laurels were reserved for See also:Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso is the purest and most perfect extant example of Renaissance poetry. It was not merely in what they had acquired and assimilated from the classics that these poets showed the transformation effected in the field of literature by humanism. The whole method and spirit of medieval art had been abandoned.

That of the Cinque See also:

Cento is positive, defined, mundane. The deity, if deity there be, that rules in it, is beauty. See also:Interest is confined to the actions, passions, sufferings and joys of human life, to its pathetic, tragic, humorous and sentimental incidents. Of the state of souls beyond the grave we hear and are supposed to care nothing. In the See also:drama the pedantry of the Revival, which had not injured romantic literature, made itself perniciously felt. Rules were collected from See also:Horace and See also:Aristotle. See also:Seneca was chosen as the See also:model of tragedy; See also:Plautus and See also:Terence supplied the groundwork of comedy. Thus in the plays of Rucellai, Trissino, Sperone and other tragic poets the nobler elements of humanism, considered as a revelation of the world and man, obtained no free development. Even the comedies of the best authors are too observant of Latin precedents, although some pieces of See also:Machiavelli, Ariosto, See also:Aretino, Cecchi and Gelli are admirable for vivid delineation of contemporary See also:manners. The relation of the plastic arts to the revival of learning is similar to that which has been sketched in the See also:case of poetry. See also:Cimabue anti-See also:Fine arts. started with work which owed nothing directly to anti- quity. At about the same time Niccola See also:Pisano (d.

1278) studied the style of See also:

sculpture in fragments of Graeco-Roman See also:marbles. His manner influenced See also:Giotto, who set See also:painting on a forward path. Fortunately for the unimpeded expansion of Italian art, little was brought to light of antique workmanship during the 14th and 15th centuries. The classical stimulus came to painters, sculptors and architects chiefly through literature. Therefore there was narrow scope for imitation, and the right spirit of humanism displayed itself in a passionate study of See also:perspective, nature and the nude. Yet we find in the writings of See also:Ghiberti and See also:Alberti, we See also:notice in the masterpieces of these men and their compeers See also:Brunelleschi and See also:Donatello, how even in the 15th century the minds of artists were fascinated by what survived of classic See also:grace and science. Gradually, as the race became penetrated with antique thought, the earlier Christian motives of the arts yielded to pagan subjects. See also:Gothic See also:architecture, which had always flourished feebly on Italian See also:soil, was supplanted by a hybrid Roman style. The study of See also:Vitruvius gave strong support to that pseudo-classic manner which, when it had reached its final point in See also:Palladio's work, overspread the whole of Europe and dominated See also:taste during two centuries. But the perfect plastic art of Italy, the pure art of the Cinque Cento, the painting of See also:Raphael, Da See also:Vinci, See also:Titian and See also:Correggio, the sculpture of Donatello, See also:Michelangelo and See also:Sansovino, the architecture of See also:Bramante, Omodco and the Venetian Lombardi, however much imbued with the spirit of the classical revival, takes rank beside the poetry of Ariosto as a free intelligent product of the Renaissance. That is to say, it is not so much an outcome of studies in antiquity as an See also:exhibition of emancipated modern genius fired and illuminated by the masterpieces of the past. It indicates a separation from the middle ages, inasmuch as it is permanently natural.

Its religion is joyous, sensuous, dramatic, terrible, but in each and all of its many-sided manifestations strictly human. Its touch on classical mythology is original, rarely imitative or pedantic. The art of the Renaissance was an See also:

apocalypse of the beauty of the world and man in unaffected spontaneity, without side thoughts for piety or erudition, inspired by pure delight in loveliness and See also:harmony for their own sakes. In the See also:fields of science and philosophy humanism wrought similar important changes. Petrarch began by waging relentless See also:war against the logicians and materialists of his own See also:day. Science With the advance made in Greek studies scholastic methods and See also:philo- of thinking fell into contemptuous oblivion. The newly Y. aroused curiosity for nature encouraged men like Alberti, Da Vinci, Toscanelli and Da Porta to make practical experiments, penetrate the working of physical forces, and invent scientific See also:instruments. See also:Anatomy began to be studied, and the time was not far distant when Titian should lend his See also:pencil to the epoch-making See also:treatise of Vesalius. The middle ages had been satisfied with absurd and visionary notions about the world around them, while the See also:body of man was regarded with too much suspicion to be studied. Now the right method of interrogating nature with See also:patience and loving admiration was instituted. At the same time the texts of ancient authors supplied hints which led to discoveries so far-reaching in their results as those of See also:Copernicus, See also:Columbus and Galileo. In philosophy, properly so called, the humanistic scorn for medieval dullness and obscurity swept away theological See also:metaphysics as valueless.

But at first little beyond empty rhetoric and clumsy compilation was substituted. The ethical See also:

treatises of the scholars are deficient in substance, while See also:Ficino's attemptto revive See also:Platonism betrays an uncritical conception of his master's See also:drift. It was something, however, to have shaken off the shackles of ecclesiastical authority; and, even if a new authority, that of the ancients, was accepted in its See also:stead, still progress was being made toward sounder methods of analysis. This is noticeable in Pomponazzo's system of See also:materialism, based on the See also:interpretation of Aristotle, but revealing a virile spirit of disinterested and unprejudiced research. The thinkers of southern Italy, See also:Telesio, Bruno and See also:Campanella, at last opened the two chief lines on which modern speculation has since moved. Telesio and Campanella may be termed the predecessors of Bacon. Bruno was the pre-See also:cursor of the idealistic schools. All three alike strove to disengage their minds from classical as well as ecclesiastical authority, proving that the emancipation of the will had been accomplished. It must be added that their writings, like every other product of the Renaissance, except its purest poetry and art, exhibit a hybrid between medieval and modern tendencies. Childish ineptitudes are mingled with intuitions of maturest wisdom, and seeds of future thought germinate in the decaying refuse of past systems. Humanism in its earliest stages was uncritical. It absorbed the relics of antiquity with omnivorous appetite, and with very imperfect sense of the distinction between worse and better Critklsm. work.

Yet it led in process of time to criticism. The critique of literature began in the lecture-room of Politian, in the printing-See also:

house of Aldus, and in the school of Vittorino. The critique of Roman law started, under Politian's auspices, upon a more liberal course than that which had been followed by the powerful but narrow-sighted glossators of See also:Bologna. Finally, in the court of Naples arose that most formidable of all See also:critical engines, the critique of established ecclesiastical traditions and See also:spurious historical documents. Valla by one vigorous effort destroyed the False See also:Decretals and exposed the Donation of See also:Constantine to ridicule, paving the way for the polemic carried on against the dubious pretensions of the papal See also:throne by scholars of the Reformation. A similar criticism, conducted less on lines of erudition than of persiflage and See also:irony, ransacked the moral abuses of the church and played around the very See also:foundations of Christianity. This was tolerated with approval by men who repeated Leo X.'s witty See also:epigram: " What profit has not that See also:fable of See also:Christ brought us I" The same critical and philosophic spirit working on the materials of history produced a new science, the honours of which belong to Machiavelli. He showed, on the one side, how the history of a people can be written with a recognition of fixed principles, and at the same time with an artistic feeling for See also:personal and dramatic episodes. On the other side, he addressed himself to the analysis of man considered as a political being, to the anatomy of constitutions and the See also:classification of governments, to the study of motives underlying public action, the secrets of success and the causes of failure in the conduct of affairs. The unscrupulous rigour with which he applied his scientific method, and the sinister deductions he thought himself justified in See also:drawing from the results it yielded, excited terror and repulsion. Nevertheless, a See also:department had been added to the intellectual empire of mankind, in which See also:fellow-workers, like See also:Guicciardini at Florence, and subsequently See also:Sarpi at See also:Venice, were not slow to follow the path traced by Machiavelli. The See also:object of the foregoing paragraphs has been to show in what way the positive, inquisitive, See also:secular, exploratory spirit of the Renaissance, when toned and controlled by humanism, penetrated the regions of literature, art, philosophy and science.

It Educe- becomes at this point of much moment to consider how tion. social manners in Italy were modified by the same causes, since the type developed there was in large measure communicated together with the new culture to the See also:

rest of Europe. The first subject to be noticed under this heading is education. What has come to be called a classical education was the immediate product of the Italian Renaissance. The See also:universities of Bologna, See also:Padua and See also:Salerno had been famous through the middle ages for the study of law, physics and See also:medicine; and during the 15th and 16th centuries the first two still enjoyed celebrity in these faculties. But at this period no lecture-rooms were so crowded as those in which professors of antique literature and language read passages from the poets and orators, taught Greek, and commented upon the systems of philosophers. The medieval curriculum offered no defined place for the new learning of the Revival, which had indeed no recognized name. Chairs had therefore to be founded under the See also:title of rhetoric, from which men like Chrysoloras and Guarino, Filelfo and Politian expounded orally to hundreds of eager students from every See also:town of Italy and every nation in Europe. their accumulated know-ledge of antiquity. One See also:mass of Greek and Roman erufition, including history and metaphysics, law and science, civic institutions and the art of war, mythology and magistracies, metrical systems and See also:oratory, See also:agriculture and astronomy, domestic manners and religious See also:rites, See also:grammar and See also:philology, See also:biography and See also:numismatics, formed the miscellaneous subject-matter of this so-styled rhetoric. Notes taken at these lectures supplied young scholars with hints for further exploration; and a certain tradition of treating antique authors for the display of general learning, as well as for the elucidation of their texts, came into See also:vogue, which has determined the method of scholarship for the last three centuries in Europe. The lack of printed books in the first period of the Revival, and the comparative rarity of Greek erudition among students, combined with the intense enthusiasm aroused for the new gospel of the classics, gave special value to the personal teaching of these professors. They journeyed from city to city, attracted by promises of higher pay, and allured by ever-growing laurels of popular fame. Each large town established its public study, See also:academy or university, similar institutions under varying designations, for the exposition of the literae humaniores.

The humanists, or professors of that See also:

branch of knowledge, became a class of the highest dignity. They were found in the chanceries of the republics, in the papal See also:curia, in the See also:council See also:chambers of princes, at the headquarters of condottieri, wherever business had to be transacted, speeches to be made and the work of secretaries to be performed. Further-more, they undertook the See also:charge of private education, opening schools which displaced the medieval system of instruction, and taking engagements as tutors in the families of despots, noblemen and wealthy merchants. The academy established by Vittorino da See also:Feltre at See also:Mantua under the See also:protection of Gian See also:Francesco See also:Gonzaga for the training of pupils of both sexes, might be chosen as the type of this Italian method. His scholars, who were lodged in appropriate buildings, met daily to hear the master read and comment on the classics. They learned portions of the best authors by See also:heart, exercised themselves in See also:translation from one language to another, and practised See also:composition in prose and verse. It was Vittorino's care to see that, while their memories were duly stored with words and facts, their judgment should be formed by critical analysis, attention to style, and comparison of the authors of a decadent age with those who were acknowledged classics. During the See also:hours of recreation suitable physical exercises, as See also:fencing, See also:riding and gymnastics, were conducted under qualified trainers. From this See also:sketch it will be seen how closely the educational system which came into See also:England during the reigns of the Tudors, and which has prevailed until the present time, was modelled upon the Italian type. See also:English youths who spend their time at See also:Eton between athletic See also:sports and Latin verses, and who take an See also:Ireland with a first class in " Greats " at See also:Oxford, are pursuing the same course of physical and mental discipline as the princes of Gonzaga or Montefeltro in the 15th century. The humanists effected a deeply penetrating change in social manners. Through their influence as tutors, professors, orators Social and courtiers, society was permeated by a fresh ideal of manners. culture.

To be a See also:

gentleman in Italy meant at this epoch to be a man acquainted with the rudiments at least of scholarship, refined in diction, capable of corresponding or of speaking in choice phrases, open to the beauty of the arts, intelligently interested in See also:archaeology, taking for his See also:models of conduct the great men of antiquity rather than the See also:saints of the church. He was also expected to prove himself an See also:adept in physical exercises and in the courteous observances which survived from chivalry. The type is set before us by See also:Castiglione in that See also:book upon the courtier which went the See also:round of Europe in the 16th century. It is further emphasized in a famous passage of the Orlando Innamorato where Boiardo compares the Italian ideal of an accomplished gentleman with the coarser type admired by nations of the See also:north. To this point the awakened intelligence of the Renaissance, instructed by humanism, polished by the fine arts, expanding in genial conditions of diffused wealth, had brought the Italians at a period when the rest of Europe was comparatively barbarous. This picture has undoubtedly a darker side. Humanism, in its revolt against the middle ages, was, as we have seen already, The moral mundane, pagan, irreligious, positive. The Renaissance defects of can, after all, be regarded only as a period of transition the Italian in which much of the good of the past was sacrificed while /jenals- some of the evil was retained, and neither the bad nor the See also:sauce good of the future was brought clearly into fact. Beneath the See also:surface of brilliant social culture lurked See also:gross appetites and See also:savage passions, unrestrained by medieval piety, untutored by modern experience. Italian society exhibited an almost unexampled spectacle of literary, artistic and courtly refinement crossed by brutalities of lust, treasons, poisonings, assassinations, violence. A See also:succession of worldly pontiffs brought the church into flagrant discord with the principles of Christianity. Steeped in pagan learning, emulous of imitating the manners of the ancients, used to think and feel in harmony with See also:Ovid and See also:Theocritus, and at the same time rendered cynical by the corruption of papal Rome, the educated classes lost their grasp upon morality.

Political honesty ceased almost to have a name in Italy. The Christian virtues were scorned by the foremost actors and the ablest thinkers of the time, while the antique virtues were themes for rhetoric rather than moving-springs of conduct. This is apparent to all students of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the profoundest analysts of their age the bitterest satirists of its vices, but themselves infected with its incapacity for moral goodness. Not only were the Italians vitiated; but they had also become impotent for action and resistance. At the height of the Renaissance the five great powers in the peninsula formed a confederation of See also:

independent but mutually attractive and repellent states. See also:Equilibrium wasmaintained by See also:diplomacy, in which the humanists played a fore-most part, casting a network of intrigue over the nation which helped in no small measure to stimulate intelligence and create a common See also:medium of culture, but which accustomed statesmen to believe that everything could be achieved by See also:wire-pulling. See also:Wars were conducted on a showy system by means of mercenaries, who played a safe game in the field and developed a system of See also:blood-less See also:campaigns. Meanwhile the people grew up unused to arms. When Italy between the years 1494 and 1530 became the See also:battle-field of French, German and Spanish forces, it was seen to what a point of helplessness the political, moral and social conditions of the Renaissance had brought the nation. It was needful to study at some length the main phenomena of the Renaissance in Italy, because the history of that phase of evolution in the other Western races turns almost Diffusion entirely upon points in which they either adhered of the to or diverged from the type established there. Speak- new learning broadly, what See also:France, Germany, See also:Spain and See also:ing England assimilated from Italy at this epoch was in the through. first place the new learning, as it was then called. out This implied the new conception of human life, L'u+oPo. the new interest in the material universe, the new method of education, and the new manners, which we have seen to be inseparable from Italian humanism. Under these forms of intellectual enlightenment and polite culture the renascence of the human spirit had appeared in Italy, where it was more than elsewhere connected with the study of classical antiquity.

But that audacious exploratory energy which formed the See also:

motive force of the Renaissance as distinguished from the Revival of Learning took, as we shall see, very different directions in the several nations who now were sending the See also:flower of their youth to study at the feet of Italian rhetoricians. The Renaissance ran its course in Italy with See also:strange inrl!':fference to consequences. The five great powers, held in equilibrium by Lorenzo de' Medici, dreamed that the peninsula could be maintained in statu quo by diplomacy. The church saw no danger in encouraging a pseudo-pagan ideal of life, violating its own principle of existence by assuming the policy of an aggrandizing secular state, and outraging Christendom openly by its acts and utterances. Society at large was hardly aware that an intellectual force of stupendous magnitude and in-calculable explosive power had been created by the new learning. Why should not established institutions proceed upon the customary and convenient methods of routine, while the delights of existence were augmented, manners polished, arts developed, and a See also:golden age of epicurean ease made decent by a state religion which no one cared to break with because no one was See also:left to regard it seriously? This was the attitude of the Italians when the Renaissance, which they had initiated as a thing of beauty, began to operate as a thing of power beyond the See also:Alps. Germany was already provided with universities, seven of which had been founded between 1348 and 1409. In these haunts of learning the new studies took See also:root after the year 1440, Revival of chiefly through the influence of travelling professors, See also:Peter Luder and See also:Samuel Karoch. German scholars made their Learning way to Lombard and Tuscan lecture-rooms, bringing back in Gel' the methods of the humanists. Greek, Latin and Hebrew many. erudition soon found itself at home on Teutonic soil. Like Italian men of letters, these pioneers of humanism gave a classic turn to their patronymics; unfamiliar names, Crotus Rubeanus and Pierius Graecus, Capnion and Lupambulus Ganymedes, See also:Oecolampadius and See also:Melanchthon, resounded on the See also:Rhine.

A few of the German princes, among whom See also:

Maximilian, the See also:prince See also:cardinal See also:Albert of See also:Mainz, Frederick the See also:Wise of See also:Saxony, and See also:Eberhard of See also:Wurttemberg deserve mention, exercised a not insignificant influence on letters by the See also:foundation of new universities and the patronage of learned men. The cities of See also:Strassburg, See also:Nuremberg, See also:Augsburg, Basel, became centres of learned coteries, which gathered round scholars like Wimpheling, See also:Brant, Peutinger, Schedel, and Pirckheimer, artists like Diirer and See also:Holbein, printers of the See also:eminence of Froben. See also:Academies in imitation of Italian institutions came into existence, the two most conspicuous, named after the Rhine and the See also:Danube, holding their headquarters respectively at See also:Heidelberg and See also:Vienna. Crowned poets, of whom the most eminent was See also:Conrad See also:Celtes Protucius (Pickel!), emulated the fame of Politian and Pontano. Yet, though the Renaissance was thus widely communicated to the centres of German intelligence, it displayed a different character from that which it assumed in Italy. Gothic art, which was indigenous in Germany, yielded but little to southern influences. Such work as that of Dfirer, See also:Vischer, See also:Cranach, See also:Schongauer, Holbein, consutnmate as it was in technical excellence, did not assume Italian forms of loveliness, did not display the paganism of the Latin races. The modification of Gothic architecture by pseudo-Roman elements of style was incomplete. What Germany afterwards took of the See also:Palladian manner was destined to reach it on a circuitous route from France. In like manner the new learning failed to penetrate all classes of society with the rapidity of its expansion in Italy, nor was the new ideal of life and customs so easily substituted for the medieval. The German See also:aristocracy, as See also:Aeneas Sylvius had noticed, remained for the most part barbarous, addicted to gross pleasures, contemptuous of culture. The German dialects were too rough to receive that artistic elaboration under antique influences which had been so facile in Tuscany.

The doctors of the universities were too wedded to their antiquated manuals and methods, too satisfied with dullness, too proud of titles and diplomas, too anxious to preserve ecclesiastical discipline and to repress mental activity, for a genial spirit of humanism to spread freely. Not in See also:

Cologne or See also:Tubingen but in Padua and Florence did the German pioneers of the Renaissance acquire their sense of liberal studies. And when they returned home they found themselves encumbered with stupidities, jealousies and rancours. Moreover, the temper of these more enlightened men was itself opposed to Italian indifference and immorality; it was pugnacious and polemical, eager to See also:beat down the arrogance of monks and theologians rather than to pursue an ideal of aesthetical self-culture. To a student of the origins of German humanism it is clear that something very different from the Renaissance of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X. was in preparation from the first upon Teutonic soil. Far less plastic and form-loving than the Italian, the German intelligence was more penetrative, See also:earnest, disputative, occupied with substantial problems. Starting with theological criticism, proceeding to the stage of solid studies in the three learned languages, German humanism occupied the attention of a widely scattered See also:sect of erudite scholars; but it did not arouse the interest of the whole nation until it was forced into a violently militant attitude by Pfefferkorn's attack on See also:Reuchlin. That See also:attempt to extinguish honest thought prepared the Reformation; and humanism after 1518 was absorbed in politico-religious warfare. The point of contact between humanism and the Reformation in Germany has to be insisted on; for it is just here that the relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance in general makes Relation itself apparent. As the Renaissance had its precurofhuman- sory movements in the medieval period, so the German ism to the Reformation was preceded by Wickliffe and See also:Huss, by the German discontents of the Great See also:Schism and by the See also:councils of See also:Con-Reforma- stance and Basel. These two main streams of modern See also:don. progress had been proceeding upon different tracks to diverse issues, but they touched in the studies stimulated by the Revival, and they had a common origin in the struggle of the spirit after self-emancipation. Johann Reuchlin, who entered the lecture-room of Argyropoulos at Rome in 1482, See also:Erasmus of See also:Rotterdam, who once dwelt at Venice as the house See also:guest of the Aldi, applied their critical knowledge of Hebrew and of Greek to the elucidation and diffusion of the See also:Bible.

To the Germans, as to all nations of that epoch, the Bible came as a new book, because they now read it for the first time with eyes opened by humanism. The touch of the new spirit which had evolved literature, art and culture in Italy sufficed in Germany to recreate Christianity. This new spirit in Italy emancipated human intelligence by the classics; in Germany it emancipated the human conscience by the Bible. The indignation excited by Leo X.'s See also:

sale of indulgences, the moral rage stirred in Northern hearts by papal abominations in Rome, were See also:external causes which precipitated the schism between Teutonic and Latin Christianity. The Reformation, inspired by the same energy of resuscitated life as the Renaissance, assisted by the same engines of the printing-press and paper, using the same apparatus of scholar-ship, criticism, literary skill, being in truth another manifestation of the same world-movement under a diverse form, now posed itself as an irreconcilable antagonist to Renaissance Italy. It would be difficult to draw any comparison between German and Italian humanists to the disparagement of the former. Reuchlin was no less learned than See also:Pico; Melanchthon no less humane than Ficino; Erasmus no less witty, and far more trenchant, than Petrarch; See also:Ulrich von See also:Hutten no less humorous than See also:Folengo; See also:Paracelsus no less fantastically learned than Cardano. But the cause in which German intellect and will were enlisted was so different that it is difficult not to make a formal separation between that movement which evolved culture in Italy and that which restored religion in Germany, establishing the freedom of intelligence in the one sphere and the freedom of the conscience in the other. The truth is that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emancipation of the reason on a See also:line neglected by the Italians, more important indeed in its political consequences, more weighty in its bearing on rationalistic developments than the Italian Renaissance, but none the less an outcome of the same ground-influences. We have already in this century reached a point at which, in spite of stubborn See also:Protestant dogmatism and See also:bitter Catholic reaction, we can perceive how the ultimate affranchisement of man will be the work of both. The German Reformation was incapable of propagating itself in Italy, chiefly for the reason that the intellectual forces which it represented and employed had already found specific The outlet in that See also:country.

It was not in the nature of the catholic Italians, sceptical and paganized by the Revival, to be revival keenly interested about questions which seemed to revive in Italy the scholastic disputes of the middle ages. It was not in their external conditions, suffering as they were from invasions, enthralled by despots, to use the Reformation as a See also:

lever for political revolution. Yet when a tumultuary See also:army of so-called See also:Lutherans sacked Rome in 1527 no sober thinker doubted that a new See also:agent had appeared in Europe which would alter the destinies of the peninsula. The Renaissance was virtually closed, so far as it concerned Italy, when See also:Clement VII. and Charles V. struck their compact at Bologna in 153o. This compact proclaimed the principle of monarchical See also:absolutism, supported by papal authority, itself monarchically absolute, which influenced Europe until the outbreak of the Revolution. A reaction immediately set in both against the Renaissance and the Reformation. The council of See also:Trent, opened in 1545 and closed in 1563, decreed a formal purgation of the church, affirmed the fundamental doctrines of Catholicism, strengthened the papal supremacy, and inaugurated that movement of resistance which is known as the Counter-Reformation. The complex onward effort of the modern nations, expressing itself in Italy as Renaissance, in Germany as Reformation, had aroused the forces of conservatism. The four main instruments of the reaction were the papacy, which had done so much by its sympathy with the revival to promote the humanistic spirit it now dreaded, the strength of Spain, and two Spanish institutions planted on Roman soil—the Inquisition and the Order of Jesus. The principle contended for and established by this reaction was absolutism as opposed to freedom—monarchical absolutism, papal absolutism, the suppression of energies liberated by the Renaissance and the Reformation. The partial See also:triumph of this principle was secure, inasmuch as the See also:majority of established powers in church and state felt threatened by the revolutionary opinions afloat in Europe. Renaissance and Reformation were, moreover, already at strife.

Both, too, were spiritual and elastic tendencies toward progress, ideals rather than solid organisms. The part played by Spain in this period of history was deter-See also:

mined in large measure by external circumstance. The Spaniards became one nation by the conquest of See also:Granada and the Spain In See also:union of the crowns of See also:Castile and See also:Aragon. The war of national aggrandizement, being in its nature a crusade, the Re-inflamed the religious enthusiasm of the people. It naissance was followed by the See also:expulsion of Jews and See also:Moors, and by period—the See also:establishment of the Inquisition on a solid basis, with lett and powers formidable to the freedom of all Spaniards from the letters. See also:peasant to the throne. These facts explain the decisive action of the Spanish nation on the side of Catholic conservatism, and help us to understand why their brilliant achievements in the field of culture during the 16th century were speedily followed by See also:stag-nation. It will be well, in dealing with the'Renaissance in Spain, to touch first upon the arts and literature, and then to consider those qualities of character in action whereby the nation most distinguished itself from the rest of Europe. Architecture in Spain, emerging from the Gothic stage, developed an Early Renaissance style of bewildering richness by adopting elements of Arabic and Moorish decoration. Sculpture exhibited realistic vigour of indubitably native See also:stamp; and the See also:minor plastic crafts were cultivated with success on lines of striking originality. Painting grew from a homely stock, until the work of See also:Velazquez showed that Spanish masters in this branch were fully abreast of their Italian compeers and contemporaries. To dwell here upon the Italianizing versifiers, moralists and See also:pastoral romancers who attempted to refine the vernacular of the Romancero would be superfluous. They are mainly noticeable as proving that certain coteries in Spain were willing to accept the Italian Renaissance.

But the real force of the people was not in this courtly literary style. It expressed itself at last in the monumental work of Don Quixcte, which places Cervantes beside See also:

Rabelais, Ariosto and See also:Shakespeare as one of the four supreme exponents of the Renaissance. The affectations of decadent chivalry disappeared before its humour; the lineaments of a noble nation, animated by the youth of modern Europe emerging from the middle ages, were portrayed in its enduring pictures of human experience. The Spanish drama, meanwhile, untrammelled by those false canons of pseudo-classic taste which fettered the See also:theatre in Italy and afterwards in France, See also:rose to an eminence in the hands of Lope de See also:Vega and See also:Calderon which only the English, and the English only in the masterpieces of three or four playwrights, can rival. See also:Camoens, in the Lusiad, if we may here group See also:Portugal with Spain, was the first modern poet to compose an epic on a purely modern theme, vying with Virgil, but not bending to pedantic rules, and breathing the spirit of the age of heroic adventures and almost fabulous discoveries into his melodious See also:numbers. What has chiefly to be noted regarding the achievements of the Spanish race in arts and letters at this epoch is their potent national originality. The revival of learning produced in Spain no slavish imitation as it did in Italy, no formal humanism, and, it may be added, very little of fruitful scholarship. The Renaissance here, as in England. displayed essential qualities of intellectual freedom, delight in life, exultation over rediscovered earth and man. The note of Renaissance work in Germany was still Gothic. This we feel in the penetrative earnestness of Darer, in the homeliness of Hans See also:Sachs, in the grosesque humour of See also:Eulenspiegel and the Narrenschiff, the sombre pregnancy of the See also:Faust See also:legend, the almost stolid mastery of Holbein. It lay not in the German genius to escape from the preoccupations and the limitations of the middle ages, for this reason mainly that what we call medieval was to a very large extent Teutonic.

But on the Spanish peninsula, in the master-pieces of Velazquez, Cervantes, Camoens, Calderon, we emerge into an See also:

atmosphere of art, definitely national, distinctly modern, where solid natural forms stand before us realistically modelled, with light and shadow on their rounded outlines, and where the airiest creatures of the fancy take shape and weave a dance of rhythmic, light, incomparable intricacy. The Spanish Renaissance would in itself suffice, if other witnesses were wanting, to prove how inaccurate is the theory that limits this movement to the revival of learning. Touched by Italian influences, enriched and fortified by the new learning, Spanish genius walked firmly forward on its own path. It was only crushed by forces generated in the nation that produced it, by the Inquisition and by despotic Catholic absolutism. In the history of the Renaissance, Spain and Portugal represent the exploration of the ocean and the colonization of the other Bxpiora- hemisphere. The voyages of Columbus and See also:Vespucci See also:lion of to America, the rounding of the Cape by See also:Diaz and the the ocean. discovery of the See also:sea road to See also:India by Vasco da Gama, See also:Cortes's conquest of See also:Mexico and See also:Pizarro's conquest of See also:Peru, marked a new era for the human race and inaugurated the modern age more decisively than any other series of events has done. It has recently been maintained that modern European history is chiefly an affair of competition between confederated states for the See also:possession of lands revealed by Columbus and Da Gama. Without challenging or adopting this speculation, it may be safely affirmed that nothing so pregnant of results has happened as this exploration of the globe. To say that it displaced the centre of gravity in politics and See also:commerce, substituting the ocean for the Mediterranean, dethroning Italy from her seat of central importance in See also:traffic, depressing the eastern and elevating the western powers of Europe, opening a path for Anglo-Saxon expansiveness, forcing philosophers and statesmen to regard the Occidental nations as a single group in counterpoise to other See also:groups of nations, the European 'community as one unit correlated to other See also:units of humanity upon this planet, is truth enough to vindicate the vast significance of these discoveries. The Renaissance, far from being the re-birth of antiquity with its civilization confined to the Mediterranean, with its See also:Hercules' Pillars beyond which lay Cimmerian darkness, was thus effectively the entrance upon a quite incalculably wider stage of life, on which mankind at large has since enacted one great drama. While Spanish navies were exploring the ocean, and Spanish paladins were overturning empires, Charles V. headed the reaction Dogmatic of Catholicism against reform. Stronger as See also:king of Spain See also:Cat/mil- than as emperor, for the Empire was little but a name, cism. he lent the See also:weight of his authority to that system of See also:coercion and repression which enslaved Italy, desolated Germany with war, and drowned the Low Countries in blood.

See also:

Philip II., with full approval of the Spanish nation, pursued the same policy in an even stricter spirit. He was powerfully assisted by two institutions, in which the national character of Spain expressed itself, the Inquisition and the Society of Jesus. Of the former it is not needful to speak here. But we have to observe that the last great phenomenon of the Spanish Renaissance was See also:Ignatius See also:Loyola, who organized the See also:militia by means of which the church worked her Counter-Reformation. His See also:motto, Perinde ac cadaver, expressed that recognition of absolutism which apacy and monarchy demanded for their consolidation (see See also:JESUITS and LOYOLA). The logical order of an See also:essay which attempts to show how Renaissance was correlated to Reformation and Counter-prance in Reformation has necessitated the treatment of Italy, the Re- Germany and Spain in succession; for these three naissance nations were the three main agents in the triple period. process to be analysed. It was due to their specific qualities, and to the diverse circumstances of their external development, that the re-birth of Europe took this form of duplex action on the lines of intellectual and moral progress, followed by reaction against mental freedom. We have now to speak of France, which earliest absorbed the influence of the Italian revival, and of England, which received it latest. The Renaissance may be said to have begun in France with Charles VIII.'s expedition to Naples, and to have continued until the extinction of the house of See also:Valois. See also:Louis XII. and See also:Francis I. spent a considerable portion of their reigns in the attempt to secure possession of the Italian provinces they claimed. See also:Henry II.'s See also:queen was See also:Catherine of the Medicean See also:family; and her children, Charles IX. and Henry III., were Italianated French-men. Thus the connexion between France and Italy during the period 1494–1589 was continuous.

The French passed to and fro across the Alps on military and peaceful expeditions. Italians came to France as courtiers, ambassadors, men of business, captains and artists. French society assumed a strong Italian colouring, nor were the manners of the court very different from those of an Italian city, except that externally they remained ruder and less polished. The relation between the See also:

crown and its great feudatories, the military bias of the aristocracy, and the marked distinction between classes which survived from the middle ages, rendered France in many vital points unlike Italy. Yet the annals of that age, and the anecdotes retailed by See also:Brantome, prove that the See also:royalty and nobility of France had been largely Italianized. It is said that Louis XII. brought Fra Giocondo of See also:Verona back with him to France, and founded a school of architects. But we need not have recourse to this legend for the explanation French of such Italian influences as were already noticeable "chit", in the Renaissance buildings on the See also:Loire. Without tare. determining the French style, Italian intercourse helped to stimulate its formation and development. There are students of the 15th century in France who resent this intrusion of the Italian Renaissance. But they forget that France was bound by inexorable laws of human evolution to obey the impulse which communicated itself to every form of art in Europe. In the school of See also:Fontainebleau, under the patronage of Francis I , that Italian influence made itself distinctly felt; yet a true French manner had been already formed, which, when it was subsequently applied at Paris, preserved a marked national quality. The characteristic of the style developed by Bullant, De 1'See also:Orme and Lescot,, in the royal or princely palaces of See also:Chenonceaux, See also:Chambord, See also:Anet, Ecouen, Fontainebleau, the Louvre and elsewhere, is a blending of capricious fancy and inventive richness of decoration with purity of outline and a large sense of the beauty of extended masses.

Beginning with the older castles of See also:

Touraine, and passing onward to the Tuileries, we trace the passage from the medieval fortress to the modern See also:pleasure-house, and note how architecture obeyed the special demands of that new phenomenon of Renaissance civilization, the court. In the general See also:distribution of parts these monumental buildings express the peculiar conditions which French society assumed under the influence of Francis I. and Diane de See also:Poitiers. In details of See also:execution and See also:harmonic combinations they illustrate the precision, See also:logic, lucidity and cheerful spirit of the national genius. Here, as in See also:Lombardy, a feeling for serene beauty derived from study of the antique has not interrupted the evolution of a style indigenous to France and eminently characteristic of the French temperament. During the reign of Francis I. several Italian painters of eminence visited France. Among these, Del Rosso, Primaticcio, Del Sarto and Da Vinci are the most famous. But their example French was not productive of a really great school of French paint- painting ing. It was left for the Poussins and See also:Claude See also:Lorraine and in the next century, acting under mingled Italian and sculpture. Flemish influences, to embody the still active spirit of the classical revival. These three masters were the contemporaries of See also:Corneille, and do not belong to the Renaissance period. Sculpture, on the contrary, in which art, as in architecture, the medieval French had been surpassed by no other people of Europe, was practised with originality and power in the reigns of Henry II. and Francis I. Ponzio and See also:Cellini, who quitted Italy for France, found themselves outrivalled in their own sphere by See also:Jean See also:Goujon, See also:Cousin and Pilon.

The decorative sculpture of this epoch, whether combined with architecture or isolated in monumental statuary, ranks for grace and suavity with the best of Sansovino's. At the same time it is unmistakably inspired by a sense of beauty different from the Italian—more piquant and pointed, less languorous, more mannered perhaps, but with less of empty rhythmical effect. All this while, the minor arts of enamelling, See also:

miniature, See also:glass-painting, See also:goldsmith's work, jewellery, See also:engraving, See also:tapestry, wood-See also:carving, pottery, &c., were cultivated with a spontaneity and freedom which proved that France, in the middle point between See also:Flanders and Italy, was able to use both influences without a See also:sacrifice of native taste. It may indeed be said in general that what is true of France is likewise true of all countries which felt the artistic impulses of the Renaissance. Whether we regard Spain, the See also:Netherlands, or Germany at this epoch, we find a national impress stamped upon the products of the plastic and the decorative arts, notwithstanding the prevalence of certain forms derived from the antique and Italy. It was only at a later period that the formalism of pseudo-classic pedantry reduced natural and national originality to a dead unanimity. French literature was See also:quick to See also:respond to Renaissance influences. De See also:Comines, the historian of Charles VIII.'s expedition to Naples, Preach differs from the earlier French chroniclers in his way of ifterature. -egarding the world of men and affairs. He has the perspicuity and See also:analytical penetration of a Venetian See also:ambassador. See also:Villon, his contemporary, may rather be ranked, so far as artistic form and use of knowledge are concerned, with poets of the middle ages, and in particular with the Goliardi. But he is essentially modern in the vividness of his self-See also:portraiture, and in what we are wont to call See also:realism.

Both De Comines and Villon indicate the entrance of a new quality into literature. The Rhetoriqueurs, while protracting medieval traditions by their use of allegory and complicated metrical systems, sought to improve the French language by introducing Latinisms. Thus the Revival of Learning began to affect the vernacular in the last years of the 15th century. See also:

Marot and his school reacted against this pedantry. The Renaissance displayed itself in their effort to purify the form and diction of poetry. But the decisive revolution was effected by See also:Ronsard and his comrades of the Pleiade. It was their professed object to raise French to a level with the classics, and to acclimatize Italian species of verse. The humanistic movement led these learned writers to engraft the See also:graces of the antique upon their native literature, and to refine it by emulating the lucidity of Petrarch. The result of their endeavour was immediately apparent in the new force added to French See also:rhythm, the new pomp, richness, colouring and See also:polish conferred upon poetic diction. French style gradually attained to fixity, and the alexandrine came to be recognized as the See also:standard line in poetry. D'See also:Aubigne's invective and See also:Regnier's See also:satire, at the close of the 16th century, are as modern as See also:Voltaire's. Meanwhile the drama was emerging from the medieval mysteries; and the classical type, made popular by See also:Garnier's genius, was elaborated, as in Italy, upon the model of Seneca and the canons. of the three unities.

The tradition thus formed was continued and fortified by the illustrious playwrights of the 17th century. Translation from Greek and Latin into French progressed rapidly at the commencement of this period. It was a marked characteristic of the Renaissance in France to appropriate the spoils of Greece and Rome for the profit of the mother tongue. See also:

Amyot's See also:Plutarch and his See also:Daphnis and Chloe rank among the most exquisite examples of beautiful French prose. Prose had now the charm of simplicity combined with grace. To mention See also:Bran-tome is to mention the most entertaining of gossips. To speak of See also:Montaigne is to speak of the best as well as the first of essayists. In all the literary work which has been mentioned, the originality and freshness of the French genius are no less conspicuous than its saturation with the new learning and with Italian studies. But the greatest name of the epoch, the name which is synonymous with the Renaissance in France, has yet to be uttered. That, of course, is Rabelais. His incommensurable and indescribable masterpiece of mingled humour, wisdom, satire, erudition, indecency, profundity, levity, imagination, realism, reflects the whole age in its See also:mirror of hyper-Aristophanic See also:farce. What Ariosto is for Italy, Cervantes for Spain, Erasmus for See also:Holland, See also:Luther for Germany, Shakespeare for England, that is Rabelais for France.

The Renaissance can-not be comprehended in its true character without familiarity with these six representatives of its manifold and many-sided inspiration. The French Renaissance, so See also:

rich on the side of arts and letters, was hardly less rich on the side of classical studies. The revival French of learning has a noble See also:muster-See also:roll of names in France: schnlar See also:Turnebus, the See also:patriarch of Hellenistic studies; the ship. The Etiennes of Paris, equalling in numbers, See also:industry and Reiorma- learning tfieir Venetian rivals; the two Scaligers; impas- nonin stoned See also:Dolet; eloquent Murct; learned See also:Cujas; terrible France. See also:Calvin; See also:Ramus, the intrepid antagonist of Aristotle; De See also:Thou and De Beze; ponderous See also:Casaubon; brilliant young Saumaise. The distinguishing characteristics of French humanism are vivid intelligence. critical audacity and polemical acumen, perspicuity of exposition, learning directed in its applications by logical sense rather than by artistic ideals of taste. Some of the names just mentioned remind us that in France, as in Germany and Holland, the Reformation was closely connected with the revival of learning. Humanism has never been in the narrow sense of that term Protestant; still less has it been strictly Catholic. In Italy it fostered a temper of mind decidedly averse to theological speculation and religious earnestness. In Holland and Germany, with Erasmus, Reuchlin and Melanchthon, it developed types of character, urbane, reflective, pointedly or gently critical, which, left to themselves, would not have plunged the north of Europe into the whirlpool of belligerent reform. Yet none the less was the new learning, through the open spirit of inquiry it nourished, its vindication of the private reason, its enthusiasm for republican antiquity, and its proud assertion of the rights of human independence, linked by a strong and subtle See also:chain to that turbid revolt of the individual consciousness against spiritual despotism draped in fallacies and throned upon abuses. To this See also:rebellion we give the name of Reformation.

But, while the necessities of antagonism to papal Rome made it assume at first the form ofnarrow and sectarian opposition, it marked in fact a vital struggle of the intellect towards truth and freedom, involving future results of scepticism and rationalistic audacity from which its earlier champions would have shrunk. It marked, moreover, in the See also:

condition of armed resistance against established authority which was forced upon it by the Counter-Reformation, a firm resolve to assert political liberty, leading in the course of time to a revolution with which the rebellious spirit of the Revival was sympathetic. This being the relation of humanism in general to reform, French learning in particular displayed such innovating boldness as threw many of its most conspicuous professors into the See also:camp at war with Rome. Calvin, a French student of See also:Picard origin, created the type of Protestantism to which the majority of French See also:Huguenots adhered. This too was a moment at which philosophical seclusion was hardly possible. In a nation so tumultuously agitated one side or the other had to be adopted. Those of the French humanists who did not proclaim Huguenot opinions found themselves obliged with See also:Muretus to lend their talents to the Counter-Reformation, or to suffer persecution for heterodoxy, like Dolet. The church, terrified and infuriated by the progress of reform, suspected learning on its own See also:account. To be an eminent scholar was to be accused of immorality, heresy and See also:atheism in a single See also:indictment; and the See also:defence of weaker minds lay in joining the Jesuits, as See also:Heinsius was See also:fain to do. France had already absorbed the earlier Renaissance in an Italianizing spirit before the Reformation made itself felt as a political actuality. This fact, together with the strong Italian bias of the Valois, serves to explain in some degree the reason why the Counter-Reformation entailed those fierce entangled See also:civil wars, massacres of St See also:Bartholomew, murders of the Guises, regicides, treasons and empoisonments that terminated with the See also:compromise of Henry IV. It is no part of the present subject to analyse the political, religious and social interests of that struggle.

The upshot was the triumph of the Counter-Reformation, and the establishment of its principle, absolutism, as the basis of French See also:

government. It was a French king who, when the nation had been reduced to order, uttered the famous word of absolutism, " L'Etat, c'est moi." The Renaissance in the .Low Countries, as elsewhere, had its brilliant age of arts and letters. During the middle ages the wealthy free towns of Flanders flourished under conditions not dissimilar to those of the Italian republics. They raised r,,,h,e miracles of architectural beauty, which were modified in ndsthe 15th and 16th centuries by characteristic elements Fllaemish of the new style. The See also:Van Eycks, followed by Memling, and Metsys, See also:Mabuse, See also:Lucas van See also:Leyden, struck out a new path Dutch in the revival of painting and taught Europe the secret painting. of oil-colouring. But it was reserved for the 17th century to See also:witness the flower and See also:fruit time of this powerful art in the work of Porbus, See also:Rubens and Vandyck, in the Dutch schools of landscape and home-life, and in the unique masterpieces of See also:Rembrandt. We have a right to connect this later period with the Renaissance, because the distracted state of the Netherlands during the 16th century suspended, while it could not extinguish, their aesthetic development. The various schools of the 17th century, moreover, are animated with the Renaissance spirit no less surely than the Florentine school of the 15th or the Venetian of the 16th. The See also:animal vigour and carnal enjoyment of Rubens, the refined Italianizing beauty of Vandyck, the See also:mystery of light and gloom on Rembrandt's panels, the love of nature in See also:Ruysdael, See also:Cuyp and Van Hooghe, with their luminously misty skies, silvery daylight and broad expanse of landscape, the interest in common life displayed by Ter Borch, Van See also:Steen, See also:Douw, See also:Ostade and See also:Teniers, the instinct for the beauty of animals in See also:Potter, the vast sea spaces of Vanderveldt, the grasp on reality, the acute intuition into character in portraits, the scientific study of the world and man, the robust sympathy with natural appetites, which distinguish the whole art of the Low Countries, are a See also:direct See also:emanation from the Renaissance. The vernacular in the Netherlands profited at first but little by the impulse which raised Italian, Spanish, French and English to the rank of classic languages. But humanism, first of Flerolah all in its protagonist Erasmus, afterwards in the long and Dutch See also:list of critical scholars and editors, See also:Lipsius, Heinsius scholar and See also:Grotius, in the printers See also:Elzevir and See also:Plantin, developed shl itself from the centre of the See also:Leiden university with p massive energy, and proved that it was still a motive force of intellectual progress. In the fields of classical learning the students of the Low Countries See also:broke new ground chiefly by methodical collection, classification and comprehensive criticism of previously accumulated stores.

Their works were solid and substantial edifices, forming the substratum for future scholarship. In addition to this they brought philosophy and scientific thorough, ness to hear on studies which had been pursued in a more literary spirit. It would, however, be uncritical to pursue this subject further; for the encyclopaedic labours of the Dutch philologers belong to a period when the Renaissance was overpast. For the same reason it is inadmissible to do more than mention the name of See also:

Spinoza here. The Netherlands became the battlefield of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in even a stricter sense than France. ti. Dutch the antagonistic principles were plainly posed in the wars of course of struggle against See also:foreign despotism. The wars nd- conflict ended in the assertion of political independence as opposed to absolute dominion. Europe in large measure ence. owes the modern ideal of political liberty to that spirit of stubborn resistance which broke the power of Spain. See also:Recent history, and in particular the history of See also:democracy, claims for its See also:province the several stages whereby this principle was developed in England and America, and its outburst in the frenzy of the French Revolution. It is enough here to have alluded to the part played by the Low Countries in the See also:genesis of a motive force which may be described as the last manifestation of the Renaissance striving after self-emancipation. The insular position of England, combined with the nature of the English people, has allowed us to feel the vibration of England European movements later and with less of See also:shock in the Re- than any of the See also:continental nations. Before a See also:wave naissance of progress has reached our shores we have had the period. opportunity of watching it as spectators, and of considering how we shall receive it.

Revolutions have passed from the tumultuous stages of their origin into some settled and recognizable state before we have been called upon to See also:

cope with them. It was thus that England took the influences of the Renaissance and Reformation simultaneously, and almost at the same time found herself engaged in that struggle with the Counter-Reformation which, crowned by the defeat of the Spanish See also:Armada, stimulated the sense of nationality and developed the See also:naval forces of the race. Both Renaissance and Reformation had been anticipated by at least a century in England. See also:Chaucer's poetry, which owed so much to Italian examples, gave an early foretaste of the former. Wickliffe's teaching was a vital moment in the latter. But the French wars, the Wars of the See also:Roses and the persecution of the See also:Lollards deferred the coming of the new age; and the year 1536, when Henry VIII. passed the Act of Supremacy through See also:parliament, may be fixed as the date when England entered definitively upon a career of intellectual development abreast with the foremost nations of the See also:continent. The circumstances just now insisted on explain the specific character of the English Renaissance. The Reformation had been adopted by consent of the king, lords and See also:commons; and this change in the state religion, though it was not confirmed without reaction, agitation and bloodshed, cost the nation comparatively combined little disturbance. Humanism, before it affected the influences bulk of the English people, had already permeated of Renais- Italian and French literature. Classical erudition sauce and Reforma- had been adapted to the needs of modern thought. tion. The hard work of See also:collecting, printing, annotating and translating Greek and Latin authors had been accomplished. The masterpieces of antiquity had been interpreted and made intelligible.

Much of the learning popularized by our poets and dramatists was derived at second hand from modern literature. This does not mean that England was deficient in ripe and sound scholars. More, See also:

Colet, See also:Ascham, See also:Cheke, See also:Camden were men whose familiarity with the classics was both intimate and easy. Public schools and universities conformed to the modern methods of study; nor were there wanting opportunities for youths of humble origin to obtain an education which placed them on a level with Italian scholars. The single case of See also:Ben See also:Jonson sufficiently proves this. Yet learning did not at this epoch become a marked speciality in England. There was no class corresponding to the humanists. It should also be remembered that the best works of Italian literature were introduced into Great See also:Britain together with the classics. See also:Phaer's Virgil, See also:Chapman's See also:Homer, See also:Harrington's Orlando, See also:Marlowe's See also:Hero and Leander, See also:Fairfax's See also:Jerusalem Delivered; North's Plutarch, See also:Hoby's Courtier—to mention only a few examples—placed English readers simultaneously in possession of the most eminent and representative works of Greece, Rome and Italy. At the same time Spanish influences reached them through the imitators of See also:Guevara and the dramatists; French influences in the versions of romances; German in- fluences in popular translations of the Faust legend, Eulraspiegel and similar productions. The authorized version of the Bible had also been recently given to the people—so that almost at the same period of time England obtained in the vernacular an extensive library of ancient and modern authors. This was a See also:privilege enjoyed in like measure by no other nation.

It sufficiently accounts for the richness and variety of Elizabethan literature, and for the enthusiasm with which the English language was cultivated. Speaking strictly, England borrowed little in the region of the arts from other nations, and developed still less that was original. What is called Jacobean architecture marks indeed an Arts interesting stage in the transition from the Gothic style. ktters But, compared with Italian, French, Spanish, German and and the Flemish work of a like period, it is both timid and dry. drama. Sculpture was represented in See also:

London for a brief space by Torrigiani; painting by Holbein and See also:Antonio More; music by Italians and Frenchmen of the See also:Chapel Royal. But no Englishmen rose to European eminence in these departments. With literature the case was very different. See also:Wyat and See also:Surrey began by engrafting the forms and graces of Italian poetry upon the native stock. They introduced the See also:sonnet and See also:blank verse. See also:Sidney followed with the sestine and terza rima and with various experiments in classic metres, none of which took root on English soil. The translators handled the See also:octave See also:stanza. Marlowe gave new vigour to the See also:couplet. The first period of the English Renaissance was one of imitation and assimilation.

Academies after the Italian type were founded. Tragedies in the style of Seneca, rivalling Italian and French dramas of the epoch, were produced. Attempts to Latinize ancestral rhythms, similar to those which had failed in Italy and France, were made. Tentative essays in criticism and dissertations on the art of poetry abounded. It seemed as though the Renaissance ran a See also:

risk of being throttled in its cradle by superfluity of foreign and pedantic nutriment. But the natural vigour of the English genius resisted influences See also:alien to itself, and showed a robust capacity for digesting the varied See also:diet offered to it. As there was nothing despotic in the temper of the ruling classes, nothing oppressive in English culture, the literature of that age evolved itself freely from the people. It was See also:tinder these conditions that See also:Spenser gave his romantic epic to the world, a poem which derived its allegory from the middle ages, its decorative richness from the Italian Renaissance, its sweetness, purity, harmony and imaginative splendour from the most poetic nation of the modern world. Under the same conditions the Elizabethan drama, which in its totality is the real exponent of the English Renaissance, came into existence. This drama very early freed itself from the pseudo-classic mannerism which imposed on taste in Italy and France. Depicting feudalism in the vivid See also:colours of an age at war with feudal institutions, breathing into antique histories the breath of actual life, embracing the romance of Italy and Spain, the mysteries of German legend, the fictions of poetic fancy and the facts of daily life, humours of the moment and abstract tions of philosophical speculation, in one homogeneous See also:amalgam instinct with intense vitality, this extraordinary birth of time, with Shakespeare for the master of all ages, left a See also:monument of the Renaissance unrivalled for pure creative power by any other product of that epoch. To See also:complete the sketch, we must set Bacon, the expositor of modern scientific method, beside Spenser and Shakespeare, as the third representative of the Renaissance in England.

Nor should See also:

Raleigh, See also:Drake, See also:Hawkins. the semi-buccaneer explorers of the ocean, be omitted. They, following the lead of English Portuguese and Spaniards, combating the Counter-Re- reaction formation on the seas, opened for England her career against of colonization and See also:plantation. -All this while the political catholipolicy of Tudors and Stewarts tended towards monarchical cism, absolutism, while the Reformation in England, modified monarch. by contact with the Low Countries (luring their struggles, knish. was narrowing into strict reactionary intolerance. See also:Puri- soh,tism, tanism indicated a revolt of the religious conscience of and Re: the nation against the arts and manners of the Renaissance, against the encroachments of belligerentCatholicism, ,"-See also:ea against the corrupt and Italianated court of See also:James I., against the absolutist pretensions of his son Charles. In its final manifestation during the See also:Commonwealth, See also:Puritanism won a transient victory over the mundane forces of both Reformation and Renaissance, as these had taken shape in England. It also secured the eventual triumph of constitutional independence. See also:Milton, the greatest humanistic poet of the English race, lent his See also:pen and moral energies during the best years of his life to securing that principle on which modern political systems at present rest. Thus the See also:geographical See also:isolation of England, and, the comparatively late See also:adoption by the English of matured Italian and German influences, give peculiar complexity to the phenomena of Reformation and Renaissance simultaneously developed on our See also:island. The period of our history between 1536 and 1642 shows how difficult it is to separate these two factors in the re-birth of Europe, both of which contributed so powerfully to the formation of modern English nationality. It has been impossible to avoid an air of superficiality, and the repetition of facts known to every schoolboy, in this sketch of so complicated a subject as the Renaissance,—embracing many nations, a great variety of topics and an indefinite period of time. Yet no other treatment was possible upon the lines laid down at the outset, where it was explained why the term Renaissance cannot now be confined to the Revival of Learning and the effect of antique studies upon literary and artistic ideals. The purpose of this article has been to show that, while the Renaissance implied a new way of regarding the material world and human nature, a new conception of man's destiny and duties on this planet, a new culture and new intellectual perceptions penetrating every sphere of thought and energy, it also involved new reciprocal relations between the members of the European group of nations.

The Renaissance closed the middle ages and opened the modern era, —not merely because the mental and moral ideas which then sprang into activity and owed their force in large measure to the revival of classical learning were opposed to medieval modes of thinking and feeling, but also because the political and See also:

international relations specific to it as an age were at variance with fundamental theories of the past. Instead of empire and church, the See also:sun and See also:moon of the medieval system, a federation of peoples, separate in type and divergent in interests, yet bound together by common tendencies, common culture and common efforts, came into existence. For obedience to central authority was substituted See also:balance of power. Henceforth the hegemony of Europe attached to no crown, imperial or papal, but to the nation which was capable of winning it, in the spiritual region by mental ascendancy, and in the temporal by force. That this is the right way of regarding the subject appears from the events of the first two decades of the 16th century, Conserva- those years in which the humanistic revival attained its five and highest point in Italy. Luther published his theses in progres- 1517, sixty-four years after the fall of Constantinople, slue parties in twenty-three years after the expedition of Charles modern VIII. to Naples, ten years before the sack of Europe. Rome, at a moment when France, Spain and England had only felt the influences of Italian culture but feebly. From that date forward two parties wrestled for supremacy in Europe, to which may be given the familiar names of Liberalism and Conservatism, the party of progress and the party of established institutions. The triumph of the former was most See also:signal among the Teutonic peoples. The Latin races, championed by Spain and supported by the papacy, fought the battle of the latter, and succeeded for a time in See also:rolling back the See also:tide of revolutionary conquest. Mean-while that liberal culture which had been created for Europe by the Italians before the contest of the Reformation began continued to spread, although it was stifled in Italy and Spain, retarded in France and the Low Countries, well-nigh extirpated by wars in Germany, and diverted from its course in England by the counter-movement of Puritanism. The autos da fe of See also:Seville and See also:Madrid, the flames to which Bruno, Dolet and See also:Paleario were flung, the dungeon of Campanella and the seclusion of Galileo, the See also:massacre of St Bartholomew and the faggots of Smithfield, the desolated plains of Germany and the cruelties of See also:Alva in the Netherlands, disillusioned Europe of those golden dreams which had arisen in the earlier days of humanism, and which had been so pleasantly indulged by Rabelais.

In truth the Renaissance was ruled by no See also:

Astraea redux, but rather by a severe spirit which brought no See also:peace but a sword, reminding men of sternest duties, testing what of moral force and tenacity was in them, compelling them to strike for the old order or the new, suffering no lukewarm halting between two opinions. That, • in spite of retardation and retrogression, the old order of ideas should have yielded to the new all over Europe,—that science should have woh firm See also:standing-ground, and political liberty should have struggled through those birth-throes of its origin,—was in the nature of things. Had this not been, the See also:RENAN 93 Renaissance or re-birth of Europe would be a term without a meaning. (J. A.

End of Article: RENAISSANCE, THE

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