The Renaissance and the Christian Faith

I. INTRODUCTION#

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the contention that a European Renaissance took place between the years 1300 and 1600/1650/1700 has stirred considerable debate.

Some historians flatly deny its existence.
Others who say that a Renaissance did in fact occur have often struggled to agree on what its defining characteristics and temporal delimitations may have been and what factors brought about its inception and ending.
Some scholars believe the Renaissance extended deep into the seventeenth century and are prepared to speak of an “English Renaissance” and “French Renaissance” in that century.

These historians have pondered a series of complex questions.

What relationship did Renaissance “humanism” have, for example, with the Christian Scholasticism of the late Middle Ages?
Is the dictum “without the Renaissance, no Reformation” really true? If a relatively small minority of Europeans could read as late as 1500, was the Renaissance experienced only by educated and economic elites?
If so, did its literature exert any measurable influence on the lives of the mass of Europeans who could neither read nor write?
Was there a “Northern Renaissance” in France, the Low Countries, Germany, Hungary, Scandinavia, and England, distinct from a “Southern Renaissance”?
Should the identification of historical periods be determined more by the ebb and flow of political and economic systems and by inventions such as gunpowder (beginning use in Europe about 1400) than by a set of innovations related to the arts, education, and religion?

II. THE RENAISSANCE: THE DISCOVERY OF THE WORLD AND THE DISCOVERY OF MAN?#

In his multivolume Histoire de France (1833–67), the French historian Jules Michelet titled the seventh book La Renaissance à la Révolution. Michelet proposed the startling hypothesis that it was during the Renaissance that at least some Europeans made “the discovery of the world and the discovery of man.”

Michelet was apparently the first scholar to describe the period with the French word Renaissance, a derivative of the French verb renaître, meaning to be reborn.

A contemporary of Michelet, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) reiterated these same themes in his own work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt avowed that the Italian Renaissance broke with the Middle Ages and witnessed the beginnings of “modernity” by emphasizing a burgeoning individualism.

A number of Italian writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75; The Decameron and On Famous Women) and Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529; The Courtier) began to promote the concept of a “perfect man” as an ideal for human existence rather than the ideal of a saint who seeks after holiness of life and a beatific vision.

Burckhardt knew that even if contemporaries did not use the word Renaissance to describe their era, a number such as Giorgio Vasari employed a parallel expression, the Italian Rinascimento, also signifying rebirth. Moreover, Matteo Palmieri announced that in his own day a new age had dawned, ushering in the rebirth of the arts and letters.

Palmieri’s reading of his times was not an isolated one. The idea of a rebirth of letters and the arts after a long hiatus of cultural stagnation (eight hundred years according to Palmieri) can be discerned in the writings of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bruni, and Coluccio Salutati. These thinkers believed that their age was recovering the beauty and wisdom of the arts, architecture, literature, moral philosophy, and languages of classical antiquity after a “Middle Ages” of cultural darkness.

According to Burckhardt, Italian scholars of the Renaissance became fascinated with classical antiquity. As they studied its literatures, arts, pagan ethics, and philosophies, they became anxious to shake off the hold of Christian medieval Scholasticism and distance themselves self-consciously from the Christian faith.

The humanistic educational curriculum of the Renaissance, rather than being resolutely anti-Christian, was essentially religiously neutral, except for its emphasis on man’s high moral character. It did provide, however, certain scholars with training in philology, the ancient languages Latin and Greek, and rhetoric in their quest to understand better the texts of Holy Scripture and to promote the Christian faith.

These Christian humanists wanted to base their faith on the philological study of the texts of Scripture. Thus they began to do battle with other Christians, the “theologians” who used a “scholastic method.” They accused “Scholastics” of founding their “school” theological systems on Aristotelian philosophy and rational deductions in syllogistic form. According to the Christian humanists, the Scholastics did not seem desirous of engaging in a philologically responsible exegesis of Holy Scripture.

The Renaissance — if we accept Kristeller’s dating for it, 1300–1600—did not supersede the late Middle Ages in time. Instead, it overlapped both the late Middle Ages (dominated intellectually by schools of scholastic thought) and the Protestant Reformation. This helps explain why Luther believed a number of his contemporary foes were Scholastics, but understood simultaneously that some of his earliest partisans were humanists.

Some humanists thought that a useful accommodation could be made between the study of classical pagan culture and the promotion of the Christian faith. Like Augustine, they believed that aspects of pagan culture such as the liberal arts, if used with circumspection, could be put to the service of the state and of the church. These scholars included both Roman Catholics such as Petrarch, Salutati, and Erasmus, and later Protestants such as Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, and Philip Melancthon.

A. Petrarch: “The First Renaissance Man”?#

If the most notable trait of the Renaissance was the vogue of valorizing the authority of the Ancients, then Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74) merits the description “the first Renaissance man.” Not only did Petrarch help create this vogue, but he devoted much time and effort in seeking to understand the ethics, views of history, and philosophy of one of the great Ancients, Cicero.

Even after finding Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in Verona (1345)—through which he came to understand that the Roman rhetorician could be quite petty and a political schemer — Petrarch often championed Cicero’s thought. Petrarch regarded Cicero, though a Stoic, as a worthy mentor for living.

Petrarch often preferred to frequent the luminaries of antiquity rather than consort with his contemporaries. He penned Letters to the Ancient Dead, destined for Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Livy.

Petrarch launched what became a major quest to find manuscripts of writers of antiquity, long forgotten in musty rooms of monasteries and churches throughout Europe. His prized personal library contained relatively few works from what he famously deemed the “Middle Ages,” a time of “darkness and gloom.” Instead, it consisted generally of copies of works by the church fathers and classical authors, made in the tenth through fourteenth centuries.

The huge tomes created by scholastic theologians did not greatly impress Petrarch. To him, many of their endless questions and their discussion of quibbles and quids appeared quite useless. History and philosophy should help people to live better. He was not convinced that scholastic tomes did this.

The Life#

Petrarch’s own earthly pilgrimage took many unexpected turns. His parents were Florentine and moved to a town near Avignon in 1312, toward the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. For a time he studied law at the University of Montpellier and the University of Bologna.

Even as a young man, Petrarch pondered the fleeting character of life. Several episodes in Petrarch’s life demonstrate that despite his bouts of anguished self-reflection, he did not view this world simply as an antechamber to the next. He greatly appreciated this world’s joys and its created order.

In his notebook The Secret, Petrarch reveals the turmoil of his soul in an especially poignant fashion. He creates an engrossing dialogue between himself and Augustine, for whom he had great admiration and affection. He sees that Augustine’s writing consistently defeats his best arguments and ploys.

In 1374 Petrarch, a melancholic and troubled Christian scholar, the so-called “first Renaissance man,” died at his desk with a pen in his hand. A distinguished Latinist and poet, he had apparently never fully reconciled his pursuit of the wisdom of the pagan Ancients with his desire to focus on the eternal state of his soul. His mind was troubled by the apparent competing counsel of his mentors Cicero and Augustine. He did not have full assurance that any scholar self-absorbed in his own literary career could serve God and neighbor in a faithful fashion.

Salutati, another of Petrarch’s disciples, felt obliged to wrestle with a number of these same troubling issues.

B. Coluccio Salutati: Christianity and the Liberal Arts Conjoined#

One indication of Petrarch’s greatness was his noteworthy disciples, Coluccio Salutati and Giovanni Boccaccio.

The same year Petrarch died, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) arrived in the city of Florence, a center of the Italian Renaissance. The next year the urbane politician became the chancellor of Florence, a position he held until his death.

A highly respected Latinist, Salutati built up a library of eight hundred manuscript books, a large collection by the standards of the day. The library included writings of the church fathers, a good sampling of medieval authors, and numerous copies of works by classical authors.

Salutati, as chancellor, defended his deep interest in pagan literature by asserting that Christian rulers needed the insights of classical authors to be better statesmen. A Dominican, Giovanni Dominici (1356–1420), criticized Salutati’s argument in a lengthy work titled The Fire-Fly.

Dominici, a popular preacher, put in sharp relief the question of whether Christians should study pagan writings
He proposed that only those Christians who were well instructed in the faith could risk doing so

Many readers of Dominici’s book thought the preacher had prohibited any reading of these works.

In his Defense of the Liberal Arts, Salutati responded to Dominici’s criticisms. He indicated that his own appreciation for the Ancients had its limits. No matter how appealing and valuable the writings of an Aristotle or Plato might be, he would never forsake Christ to follow a pagan philosopher. At the same time, Salutati was determined to use pagan authors’ writings selectively, given their many benefits. Those passages that helped reinforce the teachings of the church, he was prepared to exploit; those passages that subverted Christian doctrine, he was quick to eschew. Firm adherence to the Christian faith remained Salutati’s chief objective.

Like Augustine, Salutati believed that the liberal arts — though invented by pagan thinkers — could well serve the interests of the church if used with care. Salutati’s sturdy defense of the value of the liberal arts for the promotion of the Christian faith helped justify the enterprise of Christian humanism for some educators.

The seige of Florence#

Salutati found another kind of serviceable justification for the study of antiquity during the agonizing siege of Florence by the tyrant Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1351–1402), the Duke of Milan.

Toward 1390 Visconti decided to create an empire, but he first needed to subdue Florence. On May 1, 1390, he declared war on Florence and Bologna. As the war dragged on, a debate ensued over Visconti’s claim that he was only attempting to restore the glories of the Roman Empire and that the Florentines were thwarting the realization of such a worthy project by their stubborn resistance.

Salutati defended the Florentines’ recalcitrance in the name of something older than the Roman Empire — that is, the Roman Republic. In his Roman studies he discovered that Florence had been founded by some of Roman general Sulla’s troops in the century before the Roman Empire began.

He argued that Rome went into a period of declension during the empire, whereas it had reached its zenith during the days of the republic. The Florentines, encouraged by this rationale for resistance to those who favored an empire, took heart and called themselves the “New Romans.”

Visconti complained that Salutati’s arguments did him more harm than a thousand cavalry.

The convergence of bad weather in 1399, a blockade of the city by Visconti, and a resurgence of the bubonic plague brought Florence to her knees in 1400. On some days as many as two hundred people died in misery. Yet Salutati continued to call upon the Florentines to muster their republican virtues and to refuse to give up.

Rather dramatically, on August 13, 1402, Visconti fell ill. On September 3 he died. The siege was lifted. Dancing broke out in the streets of Florence. A republican Florence was born, ushered into existence in part by Salutati’s exploitation of pagan writings.

Whereas interest in antiquity had been significant in the fourteenth century, now in the early fifteenth century it became something of a craze for certain manuscript hunters and collectors.

The Republican Florence#

The city of Florence was refreshed with new cultural vitality after the disastrous years of 1399–1402. It was graced by painters like Massacio, the sculptor Donatello, and the architect Filippo Brunelleschi.

In 1405 Bruni (1370–1444) wrote from the papal court at Viterbo about his longing to return to his native Florence. He was particularly impressed by the city’s delights and devotion to humane letters

Salutati’s efforts to demonstrate the value of studying the Ancients had triumphed. According to Bruni, who succeeded Salutati as the chancellor of Florence (1410–11; 1427–44), Florence had become the intellectual center for the study of the humane letters.

Later in the fifteenth century, members of the powerful Medici family, while curbing the participatory optimism of republican Florence through personal governing, nonetheless provided patronage to artists, architects, and humanists and helped to ensure Florence’s role for a time as the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance.

Cosimo de Medici the Elder (1389–1464) began to rule in 1434 and dominated the city’s government until his death. When he died, he was honored as the “father of his country.”
Under his grandson, Lorenzo de Medici the Magnificent, Florence’s reputation for literary studies, letters, and arts was enhanced even further.

The correspondence of the poet Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) described the literary life of the city in considerable detail.

C. The Quest to Return to Original Manuscript Sources#

Petrarch wanted to recover a purer Latin style in imitation of Cicero and other Ancients. Salutati shared a similar view, but emphasized the value of teaching drawn from both founts, Latin and Greek. The two scholars engaged in personal quests to recover lost manuscripts from antiquity. These scholars’ quests helped foster a desire in humanists to return ad fontes, that is, to return to the manuscript sources of both pagan antiquity and Christianity.

If scholars had in hand “lost originals” of pagan authors or of the New Testament in Greek, then they might come to a more adequate understanding of what Cicero or Paul had actually written. They would not be as dependent on faulty translations or corrupted copies of manuscripts.

The quest to find “original manuscripts” (they were often copies) paid handsome literary dividends. It reached a new level when in 1394–95, Chrysoloras, an Eastern scholar from the court in Byzantium, came to the West seeking aid to fend off the Turks and Mongols. Two Florentines who had gone to study with him at Venice and later returned with him to Constantinople prompted Salutati to invite him to Florence. Chrysoloras accepted the offer, and between 1397 and 1400 he taught at the university in Florence and compiled a Greek grammar to help Italians learn Greek more easily.

Chrysoloras’s promotion of Greek prompted the search for and restoration of many ancient Greek manuscripts in Byzantium. Chrysoloras eventually served in the court of Pope John XXIII from 1410 until his death in 1415.

Bracciolini Poggio#

Bracciolini Poggio (1380–1459) was perhaps the most successful manuscript hunter of the early fifteenth century. During the Council of Constance (1414–18), he traveled to various monasteries and churches on a quest to find lost manuscripts. His manuscript harvest was quite plentiful, including:

Cicero’s orations at the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy
Asconius’s Commentaries on Five Speeches of Cicero and various works of Quintilian in Saint Gall
In France and Germany another eight speeches of Cicero.

Poggio’s passion for classical culture prompted him to relate his discovery of manuscripts in dramatic terms. He described the location at Saint Gall where he found Quintilian’s The Training of an Orator as “a most foul and dimly lighted dungeon at the bottom of a tower.”

A “liberated Quintilian” (the manuscript) became the basis for even more emphasis on rhetoric in Renaissance schools.

On rare occasions, the manuscript hunters discovered writings of the Ancients copied as far back as the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries. More generally, their recovered manuscripts dated from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.

The tension between scholastic theologians and humanists#

The goal of returning to the original sources stimulated an interest in philological and textual questions. Petrarch had engaged in philological studies. Guidelines for textual criticism remained quite rudimentary.

Whereas Christian Scholastics placed an emphasis on one segment of the trivium — dialectics, or the art of building an argument through citing authorities supporting it or drawing out a conclusion through syllogistic deductions — the humanists began to emphasize the two other elements of the trivium: grammar and rhetoric.

Salutati recognized the importance of dialectics but also proposed that a student of divinity needed to understand grammar and the ancient languages of Scripture. In one sense, humanists began to part ways with Scholastics by accenting the latter two elements of the trivium at the expense of dialectics.

Tensions between scholastic theologians and humanists began to mount. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, they were often at each others’ throats. Different appreciations of text criticism and the return to original sources, whether biblical or pagan, stoked the fires of these animosities.

D. Lorenzo Valla: Humanism and the Goodness of Man#

These tensions were exacerbated by rationalistic humanists such as Lorenzo Valla (1407–57), who appeared to relish discrediting the authenticity of long-venerated documents of the Christian church.

Valla early in his career published On Pleasure (1431; a later edition is titled On the True God), in which he lifted up pleasure as the goal of man’s life, versus the teachings of Stoicism or certain views of Christianity. God had given man his appetites for pleasures, and they should be followed. For that matter, man is good and should enjoy what and who he is.

Even though Valla believed in predestination and salvation by grace, his view of mankind (anthropology) represented a severe challenge to Augustinian perspectives regarding man’s fallen moral state due to sin.

Valla portrayed himself as a sincere Christian and eventually worked as a papal secretary for Pope Nicholas V. His skills as a philologist and textual critic were impressive. He took a hefty swipe at “theologians” who did not pay sufficient attention to grammar or rhetoric.

He was a superb Latinist and grammarian who believed reform of the educational curriculum of the liberal arts would come only if scholars knew well purer forms of Latin from antiquity rather than medieval Latin.

In On the Falsely Believed and Lying Donation of Constantine, Valla, deftly using his textual-critical skills, argued that the Donation of Constantine — which upheld the temporal authority of the papacy over the world — was in fact a “ridiculous forgery.”

The forger had given himself away by including a Byzantine expression like satraps or the anachronistic word Huns in the piece.

Valla even doubted that the Vulgate was edited by St. Jerome, given its allegedly poor quality as a translation into Latin.

He contended that Jerome was too good a Greek scholar to have made such a flawed version. He proposed that the Vulgate’s rendering of the Greek word metanoia for the Latin poenitentia (penance) was misleading. The word actually meant “repentance.”

In a later generation, Erasmus looked back on Valla’s writings with genuine but guarded admiration. He praised Valla’s On the Elegancies of the Latin Language (1444) and cited his textual work of the New Testament as formative in his own thought. Several Protestant Reformers also appreciated Valla’s emphasis on the Greek text of the New Testament.

E. Marsilio Ficino: The Platonic Academy#

A different kind of apology for man’s dignity and worth was presented by the spiritualizing Florentine thinker Marsilio Ficino (1433–99).

In 1462 Ficino was given the Medici villa at Careggi as well as a collection of Greek manuscripts. With a profound knowledge of Greek, Ficino translated the bulk of Plato’s dialogues into Latin and thereby introduced many Western scholars to this major Greek philosopher. The completed works were published in Venice by the Aldine Press (1477).

Ficino’s own reading of Plato was heavily indebted to the interpretations of Plotinus, a second-century thinker. Following Pletho’s argument, Ficino argued that a prisca sapientia, or pagan wisdom, had been transmitted to Plato, whose teachings thereafter were later validated by the Christian Scriptures. Hermes Trismegistus of Egypt was the ultimate originator of this pious philosophy.

Toward 1463 some of Hermes’s writings had been found in Macedonia. Ficino translated these documents (Corpus Hermeticum) and became convinced that they represented a “single, internally consistent, primal theology” (prisca theologica) and that Hermes was the “father of all theology.” Ficino and his disciples believed grandiosely that they stood in this same eclectic tradition that stretched back to Plato and Pythagoras and beyond and included strains of Byzantine and Arabic thought, magic, and the occult.

Ficino became a Catholic priest in 1473. He thought that his admixture of Platonism with Christianity would create a bulwark against skepticism. In fact, he wrote a work titled* Platonic Theology (1469–74), in which he argued that the backing of Platonic philosophy makes Christianity rational.

Ficino proposed that man’s spirit is the link between his body and soul. Through magic one can control nature; through astrology one can know the future. The goal of existence is for the soul through contemplation to ascend or return from the lowliness of human existence to the source of all being and ultimate good, namely, God.

Ficino also argued strongly for the immortality of the soul against the Averroists’ arguments. Despite a mystic sense that man’s soul needed to escape the confines of the physical body, Ficino’s thought did reinforce the value of human existence.

F. Pico della Mirandola: On the Dignity of Man#

Ambitious, prodigiously brilliant, with stunning good looks, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) rocked the academic world when at the young age of twenty-four he published nine hundred theses, inviting any scholar to debate them with him. In the theses he cited as authorities Plato, the Kabbalists (he collected Hebrew documents), Mohammed, Paul, Moses, Hermes Trismegistus, and Zoroaster among others.

Pope Innocent XIII condemned thirteen of the theses and remarked that Pico “wants someone to burn him some day.” Pico responded by writing a defense of the theses, only to have the pope condemn all nine hundred of them.

After a brief stay in prison in France, Pico came back to Florence. Like Boethius (480 – c. 525) before him, among other tasks Pico attempted to reconcile the teachings of Aristotle and Plato. He renounced some of his froward ways under the influence of Savanarola and died in 1494, only thirty-one years of age.

Pico is best known for his work On the Dignity of Man (1486, the title appended posthumously). It constituted the introduction to his nine hundred theses. Owing to the contents of this work, Pico is often portrayed as having elevated man’s dignity in this world to remarkable heights and therefore had secularist tendencies.

He argued strongly that human beings have free will. Taken in isolation, a number of his comments about man’s dignity appear as harbingers of a “this-worldly” secularism. A closer examination of Pico’s thought, however, suggests that, despite remarkably syncretistic elements, it was more generally couched in a heterodox Christian and Neoplatonic framework.

In other works, including the Disputations Against Astrology and the Heptaplus, Pico argued that Christianity is superior to astrology, magic, and hermetic and cabalistic forms of religion. He advocated the pursuit of Christian disciplines. Nonetheless, Pico’s Christianity lacked a distinct view of the effects of the Fall and seemed to emphasize rational reflection and philosophy as a means to salvation rather than the uniqueness of Christ’s redemptive work.

G. Humanistic Studies#

Besides Petrarch and Salutati, other writers and teachers contributed to the advance of humanism in various towns of Italy and eventually in northern Europe. Their writings were flavored with varying combinations of Christian and pagan elements.

The studia humanitatis did gain an entrance into a number of Italian schools as an alternative to medieval curricula.

Medieval scholastic schools stressed “practical, pre-professional, and scientific studies; it prepared men to be doctors, lawyers, or professional theologians and taught primarily from approved textbooks in logic, natural philosophy, medicine, law, and theology.”
By contrast, humanists argued that the study of the liberal arts was indispensable for a life of civic service.

In 1416 Bracciolini Poggio’s discovery of a copy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria provided schoolmasters with insights regarding the nature of their instruction in rhetoric. Other works from antiquity became the basis for reshaping the liberal arts.

According to the historian Paul F. Grendler, both kinds of schools “attempted to instill personal and social values based on classical and Christian sources and standards.”

Nor did most Renaissance educators apparently sense that their interest in the writings of the Ancients compromised loyalty to the Christian faith.

In The Education of Boys, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II) drew up a plan of education for boys heavily dependent on the thought of Ancients such as Quintilian, Plutarch, Plato, and Socrates.
In his The Study of Literature, Leonardo Bruni not only recommended to Lady Battista Malatesta of Montelfeltro the Christian writers Lactantius Firmianus, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Cyprian among others, but also proposed that if she enjoyed “secular literature,” she should read the writings of Cicero, Vergil, Livy, Sallust, and other writers of antiquity.

Italian school curricula became models of education to emulate and modify in northern Europe, especially in the second half of the fifteenth century. Italian universities in Florence, Rome, Pavia, Arezzo, and Perugia had notable humanist scholars.

As late as the eighteenth century many a young scholar from northern European believed that a trip to Italy was a prerequisite experience if one were to be truly educated.

“Humanists” served as teachers in Latin schools and as diplomats, civic leaders, secretaries of princes, printers, and clerics, among other professions. Numerous Benedictines and Cistercians pursued humanist studies in monasteries in Germany. The appeal of studying antiquity, whether Christian or pagan, remained powerful for centuries to come for educated Europeans.

H. The Renaissance: Critics and Partisans#

The spread of the Renaissance did not take place without opposition. As we saw, a number of so-called Scholastics entered into pitched battles with “Christian” humanists. The struggle between the parties could be intense. At the same time, some humanist-leaning scholars such as Jacobus Faber appreciated Aristotelian thought, believing that in its proper expression the philosophy was fully compatible with Christianity.

A different kind of opposition to the Renaissance emerged in Florence itself.

During the 1490s, Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), a fiery preacher and reformer, temporarily gained political and spiritual ascendancy in Florence. Advocating a demanding set of ethics, the priest attempted to rid townspeople of their materialistic and sensual cravings.

Savonarola did not oppose all artistic creations, but he did enjoin patrons of the arts to withhold their support for the creation of any religious painting that failed to capture the interior spirituality of its subject, whether a biblical figure or a saint.
Savonarola also criticized the classical authorities Plato and Aristotle

In 1498 the Florentines turned on Savonarola, and the pope excommunicated him. Savonarola was executed by hanging, his body consumed by fire on a pyre in the Piazza della Signoria.

With the return to Florence of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) in 1500 and Michelangelo in 1501, sculpting and paintings that often mingled Christian and classical themes slowly began to flourish again. In Rome, Renaissance humanism prospered among certain members of the papal court.

III. THE “NORTHERN RENAISSANCE”#

Outside the borders of the Italian states, the Renaissance continued to spread to northern Europe. Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, Hungary, and other countries began to experience their own rebirths, often adding distinctive traits. Sometimes Italian ideas, motifs, and styles were simply imported and left unmodified; sometimes they were reworked or in time rejected by northern scholars and artists.

Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, introduced moveable type printing (1439) and the printing press (1440). He published the Gutenberg Bible (1450–55).

The advent of printing, a change agent, made it difficult to stop the diffusion of Renaissance ideas. Publishers such as the Frobens in Basel, Aldus Manutius in Venice, and Christopher Plantin in Antwerp created a dazzling array of new editions of classical texts as well as vernacular versions of the Bible.

Many French, Germans, Dutch, and others traveled to Italy in the entourage of princes and kings, on business, as tourists, as soldiers, or as students. They brought back to their homelands knowledge of different aspects of Italian Renaissance culture, whether originating in Venice, Bologna, Naples, Florence, Padua, Rome, or elsewhere.

According to Erasmus, Rudolf Agricola (1444–95) was the first scholar to bring Italian humanism across the Alps to northern Europe.

Agricola fostered interest in the humanities in Heidelberg, Germany. Whereas a number of German universities were founded for traditional scholastic purposes — such as Basel, Freiburg, Ingolstadt, Mainz, and Tübingen — the universities of Wittenberg (1502) and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder (1506) were more hospitable to humanists, as was Marburg (1527), the first Lutheran university.

Guillaume Budé (1468–1540), serving as the librarian for King Francis I, helped introduce Christian humanism to France, a kingdom that appeared on the brink of political and economic greatness.

In 1453 the French had driven the English from the kingdom. Over the next thirty-eight years the crown added the large provinces of Gascony, Provence, Burgundy, and Britanny. Budé, the leading Greek scholar of France, established the College of Royal Lecturers, where the study of classical texts and Scripture was encouraged. He also wrote Commentaries on the Greek Language (1529), a lexicographical thesaurus.

In the last decades of the fifteenth century, Italian traders complained that some customers were now looking north for their purchases, thinking the skills of German gold and silver artisans had surpassed those of Italians. By contrast, there were northerners who looked south and searched out the artistic production of Italian architects, painters, and sculptors.

In the 1460s King Mattias Corvinas of Hungary constructed several residences in an Italian, Renaissance-style of architecture. The king had hired an Italian architect and imported Italian sculpture.
In the 1470s the king of Poland likewise funded architectural work in a Renaissance style.

Northern cities such as Bruges (“the Venice of the North”), Antwerp, and Augsburg also became renowned for their Renaissance art and architecture.

Northern “Christian humanism” often accented the Bible’s authority and the imitation of Christ’s life and ethical teachings in daily living.

In the Netherlands, Master Geerte Grote (1340–84) initially came under the influence of the mysticism and sacramental teachings of John Ruysbroeck. For his part, Grote, with his colleague Forentius Radewijns, emphasized interior spirituality and devotion to Christ, but likewise the value of the use of logic and reason.

Grote established the Brethren of the Common Life — a lay order (that is, no formal monastic vows) whose members provided education for many of the young in northwestern Europe.

Grote also established Sisters of the Common Life — an order of women who lived in community but also participated in the outside day-to-day life of Deventer.

Thomas à Kempis, who lived in a monastery of the Devotio Moderna in Windesheim, published The Imitation of Christ, a classic of Christian devotion. It winsomely summarized much of the spiritual teaching of the Brethren movement.

Many Catholic scholars continued to retain a great interest in classical culture while simultaneously studying the church fathers and Scripture, especially the Greek New Testament.

In Spain, Francisco Jimenez (Ximenez) de Cisneros (1436–1517), a Franciscan, established the University of Alcala.

Appreciative of evangelical spirituality, he helped create the Complutensian Polyglot Bible in six volumes (published by the University of Complutum, 1521). It included the Hebrew Bible (vols. 1–4) and the Greek New Testament (vol. 5) along with Jerome’s Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint, and Latin and Aramaic translations.

In France, a number of scholars pursued or supported humanistic and biblical studies, including Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite of Navarre (sister of King Francis I), and most notably Jacobus Faber (Lefèvre d’Étaples or Stapulensis; 1455–1536).

Faber’s Bible study led the distinguished professor of philosophy to abandon a belief in purgatory and emphasize Christ’s redemptive death on the cross as the basis for our salvation. An ardent proponent of a “humanist Aristotlelianism,” then later a proponent of Neoplatonism, the professor argued against Scholastics who portrayed theology as a science. Rather, he believed theology constituted a form of wisdom based on Scripture.

In 1518 Faber’s patron, Briçonnet, became the bishop of Meaux. In 1521 the bishop enlisted Faber, along with Guillaume (William) Farel, Girard Roussel, and others, to help him reform the diocese. They instituted the regular preaching of the Gospels and Paul’s writings. Faber translated the New Testament into French so that “the simplest members of the body of Jesus Christ can be as certain of the Gospel’s truth as those who have it in Latin.”

By 1523 Franciscans, the Sorbonne, and the Parlement of Paris feared that the “Meaux circle” was affected by Luther’s “heresy.”

In 1524 Matthieu Saulnier and Jacques Pauvant of Meaux were arrested for suspected anti-Catholic activities.

In 1525 the Parlement of Paris requested Faber to appear before it; instead, he sought refuge in Strasbourg.

In 1526 King Francis I asked the distinguished scholar to return to France to serve as a royal librarian at Blois and as the tutor for his children. Faber accepted the invitation.

On August 26, 1526, the prisoner Pauvant was put to death.

A. Eramus and Paracelsus: On the Brink of the Reformation#

The brilliant and witty Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) demonstrated a dual interest in humanistic and biblical studies.

Trained at the Latin School of Deventer (1478–83), he lived at a hostel of the Brethren of the Common Life in 1485–87. While in a monastery, he read deeply the writings of St. Jerome, classical authors, and Lorenzo Valla.

In his Adages and In Praise of Folly, Erasmus displayed a breathtaking knowledge of classical sources. He called Christians to a “learned piety”—that is, “scriptural, practical, and theologically serious”. In living out their faith, believers were to emulate the “philosophy of Jesus”—that is, Christ’s ethical teachings and example of self-sacrifice.

Erasmus carefully constructed a much-improved edition of the Greek New Testament — the Novum Instrumentum (March 1516). Erasmus hoped his text would become the basis for more accurate translations of the New Testament into vernacular languages. He believed that Scripture reveals “the living image of [Christ’s] holy mind and of Christ himself speaking, healing, dying and rising…”

William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), an admirer of Wycliffe, Erasmus, and Luther, created the first printed English translation of the New Testament (1525–26) and portions of the Old Testament. For his efforts, Tyndale was betrayed, imprisoned, strangled, and burned at the stake.

Luther used Erasmus’s edition as the basis for his translation of the New Testament into German. Initially, Erasmus thought Luther’s “reforming” concerns were quite similar to his own. Nonetheless, he could not ultimately countenance Luther’s willingness to break with the Catholic Church.

In the mid-1520s Erasmus debated the Protestant Reformer regarding the issue of the freedom or bondage of the will. The debate revealed rather clearly that the two men had different perceptions of the Fall’s effect on our wills. Luther defended the bondage of the will.

In England, the learned Catholic scholars Colet, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), author of The Utopia, also pursued humanistic and biblical studies. Erasmus was very appreciative of Colet’s piety. He developed a long-standing friendship with More, who defended him against detractors.

A number of notable Christian humanists became Protestants. They included Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, Martin Bucer, and Conrad Grebel, an early Anabaptist.

In 1518 Melanchthon, Luther’s associate, gave an inaugural address at the University of Wittenberg, titled “On Improving the Studies of Youth”, in which he extolled a revival of letters as a component of a humanist curriculum.

In 1526 Zwingli of Zürich wrote, “For what else brings greater benefits to the whole human race than letters? No art, no work, not, by Hercules, the very fruits born of the earth, not, finally this sun, which many have believed is the author of life, is as necessary as the knowledge of letters.”

Calvin, who was well trained in the classics, made extensive allusions to pagan sources in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536, first edition). He approved the import of a number of statements by classical authors while criticizing other assertions they made. He apparently based his assessments of a particular passage by whether or not it conformed to the teachings of Holy Scripture.

As for Luther, he regretted that he had received a scholastic education as a young person. Thereafter he became an advocate of a humanist education.

He went so far as to claim that the recovery of Greek permitted scholars of the sixteenth century to understand Holy Scripture better than many church fathers did. Luther averred that certain Latin church fathers, for example, made errors in their theologies because they did not know Greek sufficiently well.

In To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools (1524), Luther indicated that “a city’s best and greatest welfare, safety, and strength consist rather in its having many able, learned, wise, honorable, and well-educated citizens.” To train such citizens, he recommended they receive a classical liberal arts education and instruction in Hebrew and Greek so that they could study Holy Scripture with diligence.

In 1545 Conrad Gesner published Bibliotheca Universalis, which referenced 10,000 volumes and 3,000 authors. Gesner, the “father of bibliography,” had harvested these titles and authors from the catalogues of publishers and booksellers. Many of these works were in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and represented the continuing interest of scholars in classical and biblical culture.

The Swiss Paracelsus (1493–1541) — Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim — was much influenced by Ficino, Pico, and the Hermetic tradition. A proud man, Bombastus chose the name “Paracelsus”—“beyond Celsus”—to flaunt his supposed superiority over the famous ancient physician Celsus.

Paracelsus sometimes turned his back on the authority of antiquity in other ways.

An alchemist, physician, astronomer, and Catholic theologian, he argued that below the four elements of earth, fire, air, and water could be found the tria prima, more basic materials: salt, sulfur, and mercury.
Whereas Christ provided healing for sins, Paracelsus thought he could use alchemy to help people find healing for their physical ailments.
In Nine Books of Archidoxus he revealed secret remedies for various ailments.

After experiencing a spiritual conversion, Paracelsus sold his belongings. An enigmatic man, he could evidence considerable compassion for people. At the same time, he could verbally quarter his enemies, who deemed him a fraud or quack. The influence of Paracelsus on the emergence of early modern science is not negligible.

B. Christian Hebraism#

After 1450 a movement of Christian Hebraism emerged. Some Christians and Jews entertained amicable contacts despite the polemics, intolerance, and hatred that more generally poisoned relations between their respective communities.

The Christian Hebraists, who included both men and women, ranged from clerics to physicians to philosophers and scientists. They surmised that knowledge of Hebrew would permit them to read the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, the Talmud, the Kabbalah, and other Jewish literature.

Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, a humanist patron and reform-minded Catholic theologian. He copied Hebrew manuscripts, especially those treating the Kabbalah. Viterbo was fascinated by the mysteries of the Kabbalah. He also became adept in reading the Talmud.

Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) learned about Kabbalah from Pico della Mirandola and was intrigued. He recommended the philological study of Hebrew in the Wonder Working Word (1484) and created the first Hebrew grammar and lexicon, De Rudimentis Hebraicis (1506; built on the work of David Kimhi). He hoped to reform preaching.

Reuchlin Affair#

Backed by the emperor’s authority, Johann Pfefferkorn (1469–1523), a Jewish Christian convert, sought to confiscate and destroy the Hebrew books of Jews in Cologne and Frankfurt.

By contrast, in 1510 Reuchlin counseled an imperial commission to limit the seizure to the few Jewish books that blasphemed Christ. Pfefferkorn accused Reuchlin of being pro-Jewish.

In 1511 a significant controversy erupted that pitted various academic faculties, the Dominicans, and writers like Ulrich von Hutten against each other.

In 1513 Reuchlin was brought before the Inquisition and later appeared in various courts. He was finally exculpated of guilt in 1520.

Pfefferkorn confessed a desire to win his own salvation and prove he was a faithful Catholic by attacking Jews and Reuchlin. Flagrant anti-Semitism and academic competition fueled the Reuchlin Affair.

In 1517–18 a chair in Greek and a chair in Hebrew were established at the University of Wittenberg.

In 1518 Melanchthon, whose great-uncle was Reuchlin, became the professor of Greek. The chair in Hebrew was filled in 1523. The study of Hebrew in universities was becoming more widespread.

In 1520 a chair in Hebrew had been instituted at the Sorbonne, Paris.

Later, Christian Hebraists such as Johann Buxtorf (1564–1623) became noteworthy specialists in the Targum and the Talmud and the history of the Jews.

The movement dwindled greatly by the early nineteenth century but has seen some resurgence since the latter decades of that century.

IV. RENAISSANCE MEN AND WOMEN#

During the Renaissance, men generally exercised extensive power over the lives of women; this made it difficult for women to control their own ways.

The Roman Catholic clergy were male and administered the sacraments.
Husbands demanded obedience and a humble spirit from their wives.
The best educational opportunities were reserved for men.

In certain high-society circles of Italian city-states, both men and women esteemed the ideal of a “Renaissance man”, or Uomo universale. Such a person displayed remarkable intellectual, artistic, and physical gifts.

In the service of his prince, he performed mighty deeds with nonchalance, poise, and grace.
He was to be wellborn, physically strong, and good-looking.
According to Baldassare Castiglione, he was not to be “womanish in his sayings or doings.”
He should not be a liar or flatterer.
He should be wise and possess an upright conscience.
He should speak and write well.
He should know Italian, French, and Spanish.
He should have the capacity to wield “all kinds of weapons.”
He should be able to swim and wrestle.
He should know how to draw and paint and dance and play the lute and sing.

This omnicompetent Renaissance man was indeed an accomplished person.

Ladies in European courts sometimes evidenced an admirable interest in the arts and letters. Some women exercised considerable influence over the affairs of state. More generally, however, women from the lower classes were excluded from the artistic endeavors and educational opportunities associated with the Renaissance and excluded from access to levers of political power.

If married, they were to submit to their husbands’ wishes. Law codes often gave husbands the right to beat their wives with impunity.
In France, if a woman committed adultery, she could be killed by her husband.
If a woman had a child out of wedlock, she was often shunned by her community.

One of the central tasks of women was to bear children and raise them. At serious risk to their health, women often had one child after another. Many children died at birth or in the first years of life. Wet nurses often cared for the children of wealthy women.

Families from the upper classes assumed the responsibilities of keeping their daughters chaste and providing a significant dowry for them. If daughters had no dowries, they were frequently constrained to enter convents and become nuns.

Poor women, even if married, frequently had no choice but to be servants or work in the fields. They received much less pay than their male counterparts for equal work. In urban areas women did work in a variety of jobs.

During the Renaissance, a number of women attempted to challenge the patriarchal nature of their societies. Those women who challenged the male domination of Renaissance society encountered considerable opposition.

Italian-born Christine de Pizan (c. 1364 – c. 1430) earned her living as a writer in France, one of the first women to do so.

Among other works, she penned Letter to the God of Love (1399), The Tale of the Rose (1402), and The Book of the City of the Ladies (1405).

Laura Cereta (1469–99) from Italy, while appreciating the opportunities some women of the upper classes had to receive a good education, criticized men for thinking that women could not be as equally brilliant as they.

Even proponents of greater educational opportunities for women sometimes restricted what forms of education should be made available to them.

Juan Vives, a Spanish humanist and author of Instruction of a Christian Woman (1523), noted that the education of women was “a subject that yet to be treated.” Although he favored education for girls, wives, and widows, he wanted them to concentrate on domestic duties, not on basic skills such as reading and writing.

Earlier, about 1362, Boccacio had penned Famous Women “for the ladies.” The work consisted of 106 biographies, the first personage being Eve. Famous Women constituted the first “dictionary” in western Europe that focused solely on women.

V. CONCLUSION#

During the period from 1300 into the seventeenth century, many Europeans were caught up in an oral culture. For them, neither the newly reformed “humanist” curricula of certain schools, nor the rich literatures of the various “renaissances,” nor the private art collections of the wealthy were accessible. Their only contact with the Renaissance came as it was mediated to them through the words of traveling preachers, priests, civic leaders, or other readers or through what they happened to see in architecture and publicly displayed paintings and sculpture of the different locales they lived in or visited.

The Renaissance was superimposed on a civilization imprinted by Christian thought, traditions, and customs. Moreover, relatively few atheists dared to make known their unbelief publicly, especially in Spain, where Ferdinand and Isabella reinstituted the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century, nor after the 1540s when the papacy more generally launched the Inquisition as a means to counter proponents of Protestant “heresy,” especially the followers of John Calvin.

Between the years 1300 and 1650, the Renaissance and the Christian faith became linked in numerous ways, despite the efforts by certain scholastic theologians to uncouple the relationship or to deny the possibility of its very existence.

Often Christian humanists, whether Roman Catholic like Erasmus or Protestant like John Calvin, made clarion calls for the reform of the Roman Catholic Church faith based on Scripture.

They believed their knowledge of Greek and Hebrew helped them to understand Scripture better than their scholastic opponents.

Some of the humanists identified the Christian faith principally with a life of interior Christian devotion and following the “philosophy” or simple moral teachings of Jesus.

They criticized Scholastics for allegedly losing the essence of the Christian faith in penning ponderous theological systems. They thought Scholastics sometimes raised questions that were, after all, unanswerable and useless.

Others appreciated specific writings of the Scholastics and attempted to meld their own biblical studies with these works.

Still other scholars broke away from the hold of the authority of ancient writers, whether pagan or Christian. Historian Theodore Rabb proposes that these latter scholars ushered in “the last days of Renaissance” (toward 1700) and the onset of an age of revolution (1700–1900).