AP European History

Barron’s

The Renaissance

The Northern Renaissance

The Northern Renaissance was the spread of Renaissance ideals from Italy to northern Europe, including what are modern-day Germany, England, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Holland. This period saw the emergence of market economies in England and the Netherlands, bringing prosperity and artistic renewal to northern Europe. The Northern Renaissance differed from the Italian Renaissance in that the Italian Renaissance was much more secular, whereas religion was emphasized in the north. Social reform through Christian values and an emphasis on reforming all of society through better Christian living were the hallmarks of the Northern Renaissance. Pietism, encompassing more arduous religious devotion of the laity, emerged as an aspect of this line of reasoning.

• • Christian Humanism also emerged as the thinkers and writers in the north adopted a Renaissance curiosity for knowledge, but based their research on the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible, while the Italians had applied their new zeal for knowledge to earlier pagan texts (works from outside the Judeo-Christian ethic were referred to as pagan then, and by historians now) of ancient Greece and Rome.
  1. The Northern Renaissance originated in part because of cultural diffusion as northern students went to Italy to study and came back with new ideas and ideals.
  2. The thirst for knowledge and the new artistic and engineering techniques of the Italian Renaissance were transferred to northwestern Europe, leading to a Renaissance that was strongest in the Germanic areas and the Low Countries (Holland and Belgium).

Germany

Much like Italy, Germany was a collection of principalities that would not be united into a single nation until the late nineteenth century. Often referred to in this text as the Germanic states, Germany consisted of over 300 individual political units during the fifteenth century. At the turn of the sixteenth century, on the eve of the Reformation, Germany was at the heart of European progress. Although politically diverse (the German-speaking world included most of central Europe, Switzerland, and parts of the Netherlands), its economy thrived anyway. Towns sprouted, grew, traded. Banking expanded: the Fuggers and other German families controlled more capital than the Italian bankers and all other Europeans combined.

Science and Technology

The printing press was popularized by Johann Gutenberg (c. 1400-1468), but Johann Faust and Peter Schoffer also used it around the same time as Gutenberg. The first printing press was actually invented in China, but Gutenberg was the first to make interchangeable moveable type from lead molds. The introduction of the printing press in Europe had a massive impact on society because it became easier to spread ideas, propaganda, and stimulate education. Books became cheaper so more people read, which caused a reading revolution in society as reading became an individualized activity, rather than one person reading aloud to a group. Now the Bible was printed in many vernacular languages for the laity to read for themselves, which would have a significant social impact. This also helped lead to the advent of the Reformation as many in Europe did not need the Catholic priest to be God’s intermediary, and worship became much more individualized.

• • Regiomontanus Johann Müller, 1436-1476) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) laid the foundations for modern mathematics and science in the fifteenth century.
• • Martin Behaim (1459-1507) and Johannes Schoner (1477-1547) developed the era’s most accurate maps.
• • Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) upset the time-honored geocentric view (that heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth) of astronomy with calculations that offered proof of a heliocentric (sun-centered) system.
  1. This view contested the Aristotelian model adopted as the official Roman Catholic view of the solar system.
  2. This contradiction is a major milestone in the creation of a divide between religion and science that began during the period of the Renaissance and continued as a theme throughout European history, helping to mark the Renaissance as the start of the modern era.
• The notion that humankind could understand and control nature evolved from the work of these Germans.

Mysticism

This involved the belief that an individual, alone, unaided by church or sacraments, could commune with God. The mystics, such as Meister Eckhart (1260~1328) and Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471), author of the inspirational Imitation of Christ, pursued religious depth rather than rebellion. They stayed true to the Church, but sought to offer, to the few faithful who could understand, a substance that transcended traditional religiosity.

• • Gerard Groote (1340-1384): A Dutch lay preacher, he organized the Brothers of the Common life in the late fourteenth century, a religious organization that stressed personal virtues of Christianity rather than doctrine. Its movement of modern devotion preached Christ-like love, tolerance, and humility.
• • Both mysticism and the basic religious devotion of many laypeople contrasted, ominously, with the worldliness and smugness of the clergy.
• • Desiderius Erasmus (1456-1536) “The Christian Gentleman” personified Christian humanism in his philosophic stances known as “the philosophy of Christ.”
  1. A man of letters, he disdained the Middle Ages, ignored hard philosophy, admired antiquity, and wrote on humanist issues in purified Latin.
  2. The ultimate moderate, he championed gradual reform, ridiculed hypocrisy among the powerful, distrusted the fickle opinions of common people, and abhorred violence.
  3. Satirized the worldliness of the clergy and was critical of the Catholic emphasis on saints in The Praise of Folly.
  4. Offered a model of practical Christian behavior in Handbook of a Christian Knight.
  5. Wrote new Greek and Latin editions of the Bible.
  6. Confidant of kings and a critic of Church abuses.
  7. Aimed at gentle reform of the Church from within.
  8. He was the most famous and influential intellectual individual of his times, and used his writings and his example to preach peace, reason, tolerance, and loving reform.

Artists

• • Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) one of the master artists of the era.
  1. His self-portraits and woodblock prints, such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are still revered today.
  2. He was a mathematician who was painting landscapes and self-portraits at age thirteen.
• • Peter Brueghel the Elder (1520-1569) focused on lives of ordinary people and painted and made prints that depicted them at work and play, which challenged the notion of the Italian Renaissance that art should be focused only son religious and aristocratic subjects.

England

The Renaissance in England coincided with, and was fostered by, the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). An era of intense nationalism produced by the resolution of dynastic rivalries and religious turmoil, it gave birth to perhaps the greatest vernacular literature of all time.

• • An era of profound economic and cultural growth known as the Elizabethan Age prevailed under her reign.
• • The dramatist Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593).
• • Poet Edmund Spenser (1552-1599).
• • Scientist Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
• • The greatest writer in English, perhaps in any language, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) reflected the influence of the dramatists of the ancient world and also the writers of the Italian Renaissance.
  1. He single-handedly set the standard for the English language.
• • During the reign of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII (1491-1547), a contemporary of Erasmus, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), had fostered the Erasmian spirit in his Utopia, a book that criticized the correctible abuses of various institutions and that offered a blueprint for a perfect society.
  1. A devout Roman Catholic, he was beheaded for not supporting the king against the Pope during the English Reformation.

France

After the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), the monarchy in France was strengthened by a renewal of commerce, which expanded and enriched the middle class. France was also realizing a wave of nationalism during the Renaissance era, possibly in part as a reaction to the Hundred Years’ War. Government was centralized because the nobility had been weakened by a century of warfare and the bourgeoisie (servant-keeping middle class) provided an ample source of revenue for the royal treasury. Through the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a succession of strong kings such as Louis XI, Charles VIII, and Louis XII reduced. the power of the nobility, firmed up the structure of the modern nation-state, and brought the middle class into government as advisors.

• • Rabelais (1494-1553), a priest and a classicist, attacked the failings of French society and the Church in his Gargantua and Pantagruel, while advocating rational reform.
• • Montaigne (1533-1592) invented the format of the essay, which is derived from the French term, essaier, meaning to test. His Essays preached open-mindedness and rational skepticism and offered an urbane, modern view of life.

Spain

Locked into Catholic orthodoxy by centuries of warfare against the Moslems (Moors), who had conquered much of the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish reached the height of their expansion in the sixteenth century through exploration and overseas colonization.

Xenophobia and rigidity diluted the impact of Renaissance individualism and humanism. In 1492 (when Aragon and Castille united to form modern Spain), the Jews and Moslems, the core of the nation’s educated middle class, were expelled.

The century from 1550 to 1650 marks the “Golden Age” of Spanish culture:

• • Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) satirized his society’s anachronistic glorification of chivalry and medieval institutions in one of the world’s greatest novels, Don Quixote.
• • Lope de Vega (1562-1635) wrote hundreds of dramas.
• • Bartolome Estaban Murillo (1617-1682) was one of the great Baroque painters.
• • Doménikos El Greco (1541-1614) invented his mannerist style that was popular in Spain.
• • Diego Veláquez (1599-1660) painted magnificent pictures on religious themes.
• • Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) was a Jesuit priest who wrote widely admired works on philosophy and law.

The Low Countries

There were many societal and artistic achievements made in the Low Countries, which became a center of banking and commerce. This wealthier society placed greater importance on knowledge and art, and thus produced some magnificent artists.

• • Jan van Eyck (c. 1385-1441) was a Dutch painter of the fifteenth century known as one of the great masters.
  1. He was famed for his excellent, and often highly symbolic, oil paintings with meticulous detail that focused on either religious or secular themes.
• • Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) was a Dutch painter of the era who used complex symbolism and explored themes of sin and moral failing.
  1. His complex, imaginative, and prevalent use of symbolic figures and obscure iconography was undeniably original and may have been an inspiration for the surrealist movement of the early twentieth century.
• • Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was a Dutch master. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers.
  1. His use of chiaroscuro (dark and light) was powerful and manifested in his many self-portraits and paintings of stormy scenes.
  2. He died very poor, as did many Northern Renaissance painters.