THE RENAISSANCE

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are the period of the European
Renaissance or New Birth, one of the three or four great transforming
movements of European history. This impulse by which the medieval
society of scholasticism, feudalism, and chivalry was to be made over
into what we call the modern world came first from Italy. Italy, like the
rest of the Roman Empire, had been overrun and conquered in the fifth
century by the barbarian Teutonic tribes, but the devastation had been
less complete there than in the more northern lands, and there, even
more, perhaps, than in France, the bulk of the people remained Latin in
blood and in character. Hence it resulted that though the Middle Ages
were in Italy a period of terrible political anarchy, yet Italian culture
recovered far more rapidly than that of the northern nations, whom the
Italians continued down to the modern period to regard contemptuously
as still mere barbarians. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
further, the Italians had become intellectually one of the keenest races
whom the world has ever known, though in morals they were sinking to
almost incredible corruption. Already in fourteenth century Italy,
therefore, the movement for a much fuller and freer intellectual life had
begun, and we have seen that by Petrarch and Boccaccio something of
this spirit was transmitted to Chaucer. In England Chaucer was followed
by the medievalizing fifteenth century, but in Italy there was no such
interruption.
The Renaissance movement first received definite direction from the
rediscovery and study of Greek literature, which clearly revealed the
unbounded possibilities of life to men who had been groping dissatisfied
within the now narrow limits of medieval thought. Before Chaucer was
dead the study of Greek, almost forgotten in Western Europe during the
Middle Ages, had been renewed in Italy, and it received a still further
impulse when at the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453
Greek scholars and manuscripts were scattered to the West. It is hard for
us to-day to realize the meaning for the men of the fifteenth century of
this revived knowledge of the life and thought of the Greek race. The

medieval Church, at first merely from the brutal necessities of a period

of anarchy, had for the most part frowned on the joy and beauty of life,
permitting pleasure, indeed, to the laity, but as a thing half dangerous,
and declaring that there was perfect safety only within the walls of the
nominally ascetic Church itself. The intellectual life, also, nearly
restricted to priests and monks, had been formalized and
conventionalized, until in spite of the keenness of its methods and the
brilliancy of many of its scholars, it had become largely barren and
unprofitable. The whole sphere of knowledge had been subjected to the
mere authority of the Bible and of a few great minds of the past, such as
Aristotle. All questions were argued and decided on the basis of their
assertions, which had often become wholly inadequate and were often
warped into grotesquely impossible interpretations and applications.
Scientific investigation was almost entirely stifled, and progress was
impossible. The whole field of religion and knowledge had become
largely stagnant under an arbitrary despotism.
To the minds which were being paralyzed under this system, Greek
literature brought the inspiration for which they longed. For it was the
literature of a great and brilliant people who, far from attempting to
make a divorce within man's nature, had aimed to 'see life steadily and
see it whole,' who, giving free play to all their powers, had found in
pleasure and beauty some of the most essential constructive forces, and
had embodied beauty in works of literature and art where the
significance of the whole spiritual life was more splendidly suggested
than in the achievements of any, or almost any, other period. The
enthusiasm, therefore, with which the Italians turned to the study of
Greek literature and Greek life was boundless, and it constantly found
fresh nourishment. Every year restored from forgotten recesses of
libraries or from the ruins of Roman villas another Greek author or
volume or work of art, and those which had never been lost were
reinterpreted with much deeper insight. Aristotle was again vitalized,
and Plato's noble idealistic philosophy was once more appreciatively
studied and understood. In the light of this new revelation Latin
literature, also, which had never ceased to be almost superstitiously

studied, took on a far greater human significance. Vergil and Cicero

were regarded no longer as mysterious prophets from a dimly imagined
past, but as real men of flesh and blood, speaking out of experiences
remote in time from the present but no less humanly real. The word
'human,' indeed, became the chosen motto of the Renaissance scholars;
'humanists' was the title which they applied to themselves as to men for
whom 'nothing human was without appeal.' New creative enthusiasm,
also, and magnificent actual new creation, followed the discovery of the
old treasures, creation in literature and all the arts; culminating
particularly in the early sixteenth century in the greatest group of
painters whom any country has ever seen, Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael,
and Michelangelo. In Italy, to be sure, the light of the Renaissance had
its palpable shadow; in breaking away from the medieval bondage into
the unhesitating enjoyment of all pleasure, the humanists too often
overleaped all restraints and plunged into wild excess, often into mere
sensuality. Hence the Italian Renaissance is commonly called Pagan, and
hence when young English nobles began to travel to Italy to drink at the
fountain head of the new inspiration moralists at home protested with
much reason against the ideas and habits which many of them brought
back with their new clothes and flaunted as evidences of intellectual
emancipation. History, however, shows no great progressive movement
unaccompanied by exaggerations and extravagances.
The Renaissance, penetrating northward, past first from Italy to France,
but as early as the middle of the fifteenth century English students were
frequenting the Italian universities. Soon the study of Greek was
introduced into England, also, first at Oxford; and it was cultivated with
such good results that when, early in the sixteenth century, the great
Dutch student and reformer, Erasmus, unable through poverty to reach
Italy, came to Oxford instead, he found there a group of accomplished
scholars and gentlemen whose instruction and hospitable companionship
aroused his unbounded delight. One member of this group was the finespirited John Colet, later Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, who
was to bring new life into the secondary education of English boys by
the establishment of St. Paul's Grammar School, based on the principle

of kindness in place of the merciless severity of the traditional English

system.
Great as was the stimulus of literary culture, it was only one of several
influences that made up the Renaissance. While Greek was speaking so
powerfully to the cultivated class, other forces were contributing to
revolutionize life as a whole and all men's outlook upon it. The
invention of printing, multiplying books in unlimited quantities where
before there had been only a few manuscripts laboriously copied page by
page, absolutely transformed all the processes of knowledge and almost
of thought. Not much later began the vast expansion of the physical
world through geographical exploration. Toward the end of the fifteenth
century the Portuguese sailor, Vasco da Gama, finishing the work of
Diaz, discovered the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope.
A few years earlier Columbus had revealed the New World and virtually
proved that the earth is round, a proof scientifically completed a
generation after him when Magellan's ship actually circled the globe.
Following close after Columbus, the Cabots, Italian-born, but
naturalized Englishmen, discovered North America, and for a hundred
years the rival ships of Spain, England, and Portugal filled the waters of
the new West and the new East. In America handfuls of Spanish
adventurers conquered great empires and despatched home annual
treasure fleets of gold and silver, which the audacious English seacaptains, half explorers and half pirates, soon learned to intercept and
plunder. The marvels which were constantly being revealed as actual
facts seemed no less wonderful than the extravagances of medieval
romance; and it was scarcely more than a matter of course that men
should search in the new strange lands for the fountain of perpetual
youth and the philosopher's stone. The supernatural beings and events of
Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' could scarcely seem incredible to an age where
incredulity was almost unknown because it was impossible to set a
bound how far any one might reasonably believe. But the horizon of
man's expanded knowledge was not to be limited even to his own earth.
About the year 1540, the Polish Copernicus opened a still grander realm
of speculation (not to be adequately possessed for several centuries) by

the announcement that our world is not the center of the universe, but
merely one of the satellites of its far-superior sun.
The whole of England was profoundly stirred by the Renaissance to a
new and most energetic life, but not least was this true of the Court,
where for a time literature was very largely to center. Since the old
nobility had mostly perished in the wars, both Henry VII, the founder of
the Tudor line, and his son, Henry VIII, adopted the policy of replacing
it with able and wealthy men of the middle class, who would be strongly
devoted to themselves. The court therefore became a brilliant and
crowded circle of unscrupulous but unusually adroit statesmen, and a
center of lavish entertainments and display. Under this new aristocracy
the rigidity of the feudal system was relaxed, and life became somewhat
easier for all the dependent classes. Modern comforts, too, were largely
introduced, and with them the Italian arts; Tudor architecture, in
particular, exhibited the originality and splendor of an energetic and selfconfident age. Further, both Henries, though perhaps as essentially
selfish and tyrannical as almost any of their predecessors, were politic
and far-sighted, and they took a genuine pride in the prosperity of their
kingdom. They encouraged trade; and in the peace which was their best
gift the well-being of the nation as a whole increased by leaps and
bounds.