RENAISSANCE - c.1300 - c.1550

In the fourteenth century Italy was not united, in the North there was a group of over a hundred cities, which all owed obedience to the emperor beyond the Alps, but which were in reality republics independent of each other and of everyone else. After the Crusades many of these cities gained considerable wealth, chiefly by engaging in trade with the East and each was jealous of the progress of the others. So far from combining to form a new European nation, the greater ones, such as Florence, Milan, and Venice, were in a state of continuous and unpatriotic strife with one another. Yet these cities, through their commerce, reached a degree of prosperity and culture undreamed of in Europe since Roman times. The Renaissance, is the term applied, to the gradual transition from the middle ages to the modern, characterized by a revolution in the world of art and literature brought about by a revival and application of antique classic learning.

Cosimo de Medici and his son Lorenzo used their wealth to make themselves popular in the Florentine Republic, especially with the lower orders. Soon after his accession an attempt was made to break the power of the Medici family, Lorenzo escaped, but his brother was stabbed. Lorenzo lived amid a princely court and a princely luxury, but avoided the actual title of prince, his entertainment's, made to keep the favour of the Florentines, earned for him the title of the " Magnifico." To this man is due, as much as to any, the continued progress of the intellectual movement of which Dante had been the first great product. It became his ambition to make Florence the centre of every branch of the new learning and culture. It was everyone's aim to study the classics, and to rediscover by that study the knowledge and the culture that the Romans and Greeks had possessed before the invasions of their civilization.

But the manuscripts in which these works were contained were few and precious, and it was only by laborious search in the attics of monasteries or castles that there were brought to light such copies as had escaped the barbarians, and had been preserved by the Church. And the difficulties were even greater when men's eyes turned towards the great teachers of the Romans themselves. Greek manuscripts were rarer still, and Greek itself was a comparatively unknown tongue.

REVIVAL OF LEARNING

The scholar Poggio searched all the convent libraries he could in Germany and Italy and brought to light many lost and forgotten manuscripts, including the text of Quintilian's "Institutions." We read that Petrarch, one of the most ardent manuscript collectors in the fourteenth century, who is said to have been a friend of the English Chaucer, possessed and cherished deeply a copy of Homer, which he could not read.

Before 1400 a few Greek scholars were brought to Italy. A Greek grammar was published, and copies of a few books were procured; It is often stated, with only partial accuracy, that the Renaissance movement was stimulated by, and the revived interest in Greek literature due to, the flight of Greek scholars from Byzantium when the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453.

No doubt the scholars fleeing before the Turks did in many cases take refuge in Italy and support themselves by teaching and lecturing Greek. Interest in Greek was far older than this Boccaccio (d. 1375) spent his declining years in studying the language, and the Greeks Chrysolaras and Argyropoulos were staying in Italy as honoured guests and were revered teachers some years before the Greek Empire fell.

Much of the work of collecting and copying had been done before Lorenzo's time, but more remained to be done. He founded libraries, and stocked them with the manuscripts, so that these stores of learning should be freely accessible. He spent immense sums in completing the search, and kept forty-five copyists in constant work reduplicating the originals. He founded schools where students and poets from all over Italy were encouraged to devote their energies to the new learning, and kept around him a brilliant circle of men of genius - poets, artists, and musicians - who won for Florence the title of the "Modern Athens." Three great forms of art reached their climax in Lorenzo's Florence - architecture, sculpture, and painting.However the art of Renaissance Italy made little general impression upon the northern nations. Here and there an artist, like Durer, came under its influence, only to develop a style of his own.

Poggio Bracciolini (d. 1459) and Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) represent the earlier stages of Renaissance scholarship, which reached its full height with Angelo Poliziano, Filelfo and Marsilio Ficino, Valla was daring enough to criticize the Apostles' Creed, and he it was who exposed the forgery of the alleged "Donation of Constantine" on which many of the more extravagant Papal claims had been based. All these scholars, it may be noticed, were either Florentines by birth, or spent a great part of their active life in that city under the patronage of Cosimo de Medici and his son Lorenzo " II Magnifico."

A NEW LEARNING

In no sphere are the new ideas of the period more clearly shown than in that of education. Gone for ever are the arid scholastic arguments, and the university courses of "Trivium" and "quadrivium" are laid aside in favour of humanistic study. At first all the universities were strongly opposed to the "new learning" and formed against it a united front, but they were gradually forced to open their doors to it. One. of the earliest to show a comparatively favourable attitude was the university of Padua, and hither students of all nations flocked to hear the lectures of the great humanist Guarino da Verona (d. 1460). When the University of Ferrara, too, was founded in 1430. Guarino was made Professor of Rhetoric.

Guarino's son, Battista, compared his father's pupils to the Trojan horse of Homer, for "as from the Trojan Horse of old the Greek heroes spread over the captured city, so from that famous academy of my father has proceeded the greater number of those scholars who have carried learning, not merely throughout Italy, but far beyond her borders.'' (Trans. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators, p.177-8.)

Most famous of all Renaissance schoolmasters was Vittorino da Feltre (d. 1446), who entered the service of the Gonzaga family at Mantua in 1423, and stayed there until his death, as tutor to the young princes. Gian Francesco Gonzaga and his charming wife made much of Vittorino and allowed him a free hand in educating the children, and in choosing their companions. Vittorino formed a school of carefully chosen boys, not necessarily of noble birth, although he said that in his opinion thoroughbred colts were best worth training. The fees paid by the wealthy covered the necessities of poor but promising scholars, and Vittorino made no distinctions between them. All his pupils loved him.

Study of each boy's natural talents showed Vittorino his capacities. and he encouraged his pupils to study those things in which they most delighted, instead of forcing the boys' minds into the conventional moulds. He brought Greek masters to the school so that the boys should learn the language accurately, and he gave them all a thorough training in the classics and history as well as in mathematics and music. He was a firm disciplinarian, but seldom found it necessary to punish his pupils, unlike mediaeval schoolmasters who believed flogging the only means of fixing Latin grammar in their pupils minds, and who could not take the degree of M.A. until they had established their ability to beat a boy with thoroughness and efficiency. The boy on whom they demonstrated was given a penny for his pains.

Girls were permitted to study the classics and history, and some achieved fame in scholarship, but they were not expected to take too deep an interest in mathematics and astrology, nor must they fail to respect the conventions. Little Cecilia Gonzaga, who was learning Greek grammar at the age of seven, was quite the equal of her brothers, and two of Guarino's most promising pupils were young girls, but humanistic education was by no means general among Renaissance women.

Great libraries were formed, notably by the Medici, by the Renaissance Popes and by Duke Federigo da Montefeltro (1422-82) at Urbino.His library, described by Vespasiano Bisticci as being even more complete than that of the Medici, contained an army of 30 to 40 scribes who were constantly at work; "he spared neither cost nor labour." and spent 30,000 ducats on his manuscripts, all of which were sumptuously bound in crimson and silver. "Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers."

In the early days of the Renaissance, it was the custom of Italian scholars to despise and mock at the scholarship of the "Ultramontanes" who climbed the Alps and descended into Italy in search of learning. Vespasiano describes a certain German bishop, who became absorbed in the volume of Plotinus he was reading, and " he .... sat over it for three hours without stirring, and never lifted his eyes from the book; not like other ultramontanes, who have as a rule no taste for close study."

Moreover, when an English ambassador to Rome made an elegant Latin speech before Pius II (1458 - 1464), the Pope burst into tears of joy to think that such eloquence could come from the lips of an Englishman, for England beyond all other countries was believed to be the home of barbarism. The "barbarian" ultramontanes, however, continued to visit Italy in ever-increasing numbers, and to collect manuscripts and take them home to their northern libraries. One English collector bought so many books in Florence that he had to charter a special ship to take them back to England. It is sad to reflect that all save three of these books are now lost.

THE GERMAN RENAISSANCE

The great contribution of Germany to the Renaissance movement was the critical spirit which gave to scholarship the quality it had lacked hitherto. The German humanists were preoccupied with Christian rather than pagan philosophy, they were less likely than the Italians to become intoxicated with the beauty of words or style.

Chief of all is the great scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536). It was the aim of his life to increase the sum of human knowledge; he is often claimed as a reformer, and it is true that he did expose and mock at abuses - for instance, in his satire "In Praise of Folly" - but he believed that if ignorance and superstition could be dissipated, then reform would come naturally and without violence. His English friends, Colet of St. Paul's, and Sir Thomas More, welcomed him when he visited England, and tried to put his theories into practice. The greatest work of Erasmus, for which his name will always be famous, is his edition of the New Testament and the Letters of Jerome. He settled in Bagel to see the great work through the press (for it was printed there by John Froben) and in 1516 his Greek Testament appeared and made a profound stir in the world of letters.

In France, François Rabelais (d. 1553) was sharpening his wits at the expense of the clergy, in his entertaining books describing the adventures of Gargantua (printed at Lyons in 1532), and Pantagruel "Laughter," he declared, "belongs to man alone," and to prove his thesis, the books sold at an amazing rate, for all the world enjoys being made to laugh. Rabelais sounded a note of mirth which made a chord with the philosophical utterances of Montaigne (d. 1592) and Nicholas Bacon (d. 1626) and the shrewd criticism of Desiderius Erasmus.

The Renaissance had been slow to cross the Alps, but by the sixteenth century it had gained more than it had lost by its transference from Italy, where the first impulse had died away. No longer beguiled by the dreams of the Middle Ages, of a great Christian republic, it began to emerge from the bonds of ecclesiastical and feudal institutions, to form distinct nationalities and languages; In France, England and Spain, absolutism seemed triumphant. The Renaissance fashion for anything pertaining to antiquity re-established the dignity of a Roman Law which tended to identify the will of the monarch and the laws of the land, and re-asserted the notion of a 'hero', the the honest leader. Even the mother of Parliament survived only as an instrument of royal government. Nations looked upon it as a necessity, an instrument of liberation and revival; sovereigns saw in it simply a means of exercising dominion, a right acquired for all time, the sole legitimate form of government.

The period was also marked by a spirit of exploration of lands beyond the sea, by the extinction of the scholastic philosophy, by the new ideas on astronomy promulgated by Copernicus, and by the invention of printing and gunpowder.