A Political and Social History of Modern Europe Part 18

[Sidenote: Medieval Culture]

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--the height of the middle ages --came a wonderful outburst of intellectual and artistic activity.

Under the immediate auspices of the Catholic Church it brought forth abundantly a peculiarly Christian culture. Renewed acquaintance with Greek philosophy, especially with that of Aristotle, was joined with a lively religious faith to produce the so called scholastic philosophy and theology. Great inst.i.tutions of higher learning--the universities-- were now founded, in which centered the revived study not only of philosophy but of law and medicine as well, and over which appeared the first cloud-wrapped dawn of modern experimental science. And side by side with the sonorous Latin tongue, which long continued to be used by scholars, were formed the vernacular languages--German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.--that gave a wealth of variety to reviving popular literature. Majestic cathedrals with pointed arch and flying b.u.t.tress, with lofty spire and delicate tracery, wonderful wood carvings, illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, quaint gargoyles, myriad statues of saints and martyrs, delicately colored paintings of surpa.s.sing beauty--all betokened the great Christian, or Gothic, art of the middle ages.

[Sidenote: New Elements in Culture of Sixteenth Century]

The educated person of the sixteenth century was heir to all these cultural periods: intellectually and artistically he was descended from Greeks, Romans, Mohammedans, and his medieval Christian forbears. But the sixteenth century itself added cultural contributions to the original store, which help to explain not only the social, political, and ecclesiastical activities of that time but also many of our present-day actions and ideas. The essentially new factors in sixteenth-century culture may be reckoned as (1) the diffusion of knowledge as a result of the invention of printing; (2) the development of literary criticism by means of humanism; (3) a golden age of painting and architecture; (4) the flowering of national literature; (5) the beginnings of modern natural science.

THE INVENTION OF PRINTING

The present day is notably distinguished by the prevalence of enormous numbers of printed books, periodicals, and newspapers. Yet this very printing, which seems so commonplace to us now, has had, in all, but a comparatively brief existence. From the earliest recorded history up to less than five hundred years ago every book in Europe [Footnote: For an account of early printing in China, j.a.pan, and Korea, see the informing article "Typography" in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 11th edition, Vol. XXVII, p. 510.] was laboriously written by hand, [Footnote: It is interesting to note the meaning of our present word "ma.n.u.script," which is derived from the Latin--_manu scriptum_ ("written by hand").] and, although copyists acquired an astonishing swiftness in reproducing books, libraries of any size were the property exclusively of rich inst.i.tutions or wealthy individuals. It was at the beginning of modern times that the invention of printing revolutionized intellectual history.

Printing is an extremely complicated process, and it is small wonder that centuries of human progress elapsed before its invention was complete. Among the most essential elements of the perfected process are _movable type_ with which the impression is made, and _paper_, on which it is made. A few facts may be conveniently culled from the long involved story of the development of each of these elements.

[Sidenote: Development of paper]

For their ma.n.u.scripts the Greeks and Romans had used papyrus, the prepared fiber of a tough reed which grew in the valley of the Nile River. This papyrus was very expensive and heavy, and not at all suitable for printing. Parchment, the dressed skins of certain animals, especially sheep, which became the standard material for the hand- written doc.u.ments of the middle ages, was extremely durable, but like papyrus, it was costly, unwieldy, and ill adapted for printing.

The forerunner of modern European paper was probably that which the Chinese made from silk as early as the second century before Christ.

For silk the Mohammedans at Mecca and Damascus in the middle of the eighth century appear to have subst.i.tuted cotton, and this so-called Damascus paper was later imported into Greece and southern Italy and into Spain. In the latter country the native-grown hemp and flax were again subst.i.tuted for cotton, and the resulting linen paper was used considerably in Castile in the thirteenth century and thence penetrated across the Pyrenees into France and gradually all over western and central Europe. Parchment, however, for a long time kept its preeminence over silk, cotton, or linen paper, because of its greater firmness and durability, and notaries were long forbidden to use any other substance in their official writings. Not until the second half of the fifteenth century was a.s.sured the triumph of modern paper, [Footnote: The word "paper" is derived from the ancient "papyrus."] as distinct from papyrus or parchment, when printing, then on the threshold of its career, demanded a substance of moderate price that would easily receive the impression of movable type.

[Sidenote: Development of Movable Type]

The idea of movable type was derived from an older practice of carving reverse letters or even whole inscriptions upon blocks of wood so that when they were inked and applied to writing material they would leave a clear impression. Medieval kings and princes frequently had their signatures cut on these blocks of wood or metal, in order to impress them on charters, and a kind of engraving was employed to reproduce pictures or written pages as early as the twelfth century.

It was a natural but slow evolution from block-impressing to the practice of casting individual letters in separate little pieces of metal, all of the same height and thickness, and then arranging them in any desired sequence for printing. The great advantage of movable type over the blocks was the infinite variety of work which could be done by simply setting and resetting the type.

The actual history of the transition from the use of blocks to movable type--the real invention of modern printing--is shrouded in a good deal of mystery and dispute. It now appears likely that by the year 1450, an obscure Lourens Coster of the Dutch town of Haarlem had devised movable type, that Coster's invention was being utilized by a certain Johan Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz, and that improvements were being added by various other contemporaries. Papal letters of indulgence and a version of the Bible, both printed in 1454, are the earliest monuments of the new art.

Slowly evolved, the marvelous art, once thoroughly developed, spread with almost lightning rapidity from Mainz throughout the Germanics, the Italian states, France, and England,--in fact, throughout all Christian Europe. It was welcomed by scholars and applauded by popes. Printing presses were erected at Rome in 1466, and book-publishing speedily became an honorable and lucrative business in every large city. Thus, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the scholarly Aldus Manutius was operating in Venice the famous Aldine press, whose beautiful editions of the Greek and Latin cla.s.sics are still esteemed as masterpieces of the printer's art.

The early printers fashioned the characters of their type after the letters that the scribes had used in long-hand writing. Different kinds of common hand-writing gave rise, therefore, to such varieties of type as the heavy black-faced Gothic that prevailed in the Germanics or the several adaptations of the clear, neat Roman characters which predominated in southern Europe and in England. The compressed "italic"

type was devised in the Aldine press in Venice to enable the publisher to crowd more words upon a page.

[Sidenote: Results of Invention of Printing]

A constant development of the new art characterized the sixteenth century, and at least three remarkable results became evident. (1) There was an almost incalculable increase in the supply of books. Under earlier conditions, a skilled and conscientious copyist might, by prodigious toil, produce two books in a year. Now, in a single year of the sixteenth century, some 24,000 copies of one of Erasmus's books were struck off by one printing press.

(2) This indirectly increased the demand for books. By lessening the expense of books and enabling at least all members of the middle cla.s.s, as well as n.o.bles and princes, to possess private libraries, printing became the most powerful means of diffusing knowledge and broadening education.

(3) A greater degree of accuracy was guaranteed by printing than by manual copying. Before the invention of printing, it was well-nigh impossible to secure two copies of any work that would be exactly alike. Now, the constant proof-reading and the fact that an entire edition was printed from the same type were securities against the anciently recurring faults of forgery or of error.

HUMANISM

Printing, the invention of which has just been described, was the new vehicle of expression for the ideas of the sixteenth century. These ideas centered in something which commonly is called "humanism." To appreciate precisely what humanism means--to understand the dominant intellectual interests of the educated people of the sixteenth century --it will be necessary first to turn back some two hundred years earlier and say a few words about the first great humanist, Francesco Petrarca, or, as he is known to us, Petrarch.

[Sidenote: Petrarch, "the Father of Humanism"]

The name of Petrarch, who flourished in the fourteenth century (1304- 1374), has been made familiar to most of us by sentimentalists or by literary scholars who in the one case have pitied his loves and his pa.s.sions or in the other have admired the grace and form of his Italian sonnets. But to the student of history Petrarch has seemed even more important as the reflection, if not the source, of a brilliant intellectual movement, which, taking rise in his century, was to grow in brightness in the fifteenth and flood the sixteenth with resplendent light.

In some respects Petrarch was a typical product of the fourteenth century. He was in close touch with the great medieval Christian culture of his day. He held papal office at Avignon in France. He was pious and "old-fashioned" in many of his religious views, especially in his dislike for heretics. Moreover, he wrote what he professed to be his best work in Latin and expressed naught but contempt for the new Italian language, which, under the immortal Dante, had already acquired literary polish. [Footnote: Ironically enough, it was not his Latin writings but his beautiful Italian sonnets, of which he confessed to be ashamed, that have preserved the popular fame of Petrarch to the present day.] He showed no interest in natural science or in the physical world about him--no sympathy for any novelty.

Yet despite a good deal of natural conservatism, Petrarch added one significant element to the former medieval culture. That was an appreciation, amounting almost to worship, of the pagan Greek and Latin literature. Nor was he interested in antique things because they supported his theology or inculcated Christian morals; his fondness for them was simply and solely because they were inherently interesting. In a mult.i.tude of polished Latin letters and in many of his poems, as well as by daily example and precept to his admiring contemporaries, he preached the revival of the cla.s.sics.

[Sidenote: Characteristics of Petrarch's Humanism]

This one obsessing idea of Petrarch carried with it several corollaries which const.i.tuted the essence of humanism and profoundly affected European thought for several generations after the Italian poet. They may be enumerated as follows:

(1) Petrarch felt as no man had felt since pagan days the pleasure of mere human life,--the "joy of living." This, he believed, was not in opposition to the Christian religion, although it contradicted the basis of ascetic life. He remained a Catholic Christian, but he a.s.sailed the monks.

(2) Petrarch possessed a confidence in himself, which in the constant repet.i.tion in his writings of first-person p.r.o.nouns partook of boastfulness. He replaced a reliance upon Divine Providence by a sense of his own human ability and power.

(3) Petrarch entertained a clear notion of a living bond between himself and men of like sort in the ancient world. Greek and Roman civilization was to him no dead and buried antiquity, but its poets and thinkers lived again as if they were his neighbors. His love for the past amounted almost to an ecstatic enthusiasm.

(4) Petrarch tremendously influenced his contemporaries. He was no local, or even national, figure. He was revered and respected as "the scholar of Europe." Kings vied with each other in heaping benefits upon him. The Venetian senate gave him the freedom of the city. Both the University of Paris and the munic.i.p.ality of Rome crowned him with laurel.

[Sidenote: "Humanism" and the "Humanities"; Definitions]

The admirers and disciples of Petrarch were attracted by the fresh and original human ideas of life with which such cla.s.sical writers as Virgil, Horace, and Cicero overflowed. This new-found charm the scholars called humanity (_Humanitas_) and themselves they styled "humanists." Their studies, which comprised the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, and, incidentally, profane history, were the humanities or "letters" (_litterae humaniores_), and the pursuit of them was humanism.

Petrarch himself was a serious Latin scholar but knew Greek quite indifferently. About the close of his century, however, Greek teachers came in considerable numbers from Constantinople and Greece across the Adriatic to Italy, and a certain Chrysoloras set up an influential Greek school at Florence. [Footnote: This was before the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453.] Thenceforth, the study of both Latin and Greek went on apace. Monasteries were searched for old ma.n.u.scripts; libraries for the cla.s.sics were established; many an ancient masterpiece, long lost, was now recovered and treasured as fine gold. [Footnote: It was during this time that long-lost writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Quintilian, Plautus, Lucretius, etc., were rediscovered.]

[Sidenote: Humanism and Christianity]

At first, humanism met with some opposition from ardent churchmen who feared that the revival of pagan literature might exert an unwholesome influence upon Christianity. But gradually the humanists came to be tolerated and even encourage, until several popes, notably Julius II and Leo X at the opening of the sixteenth century, themselves espoused the cause of humanism. The father of Leo X was the celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici, who subsidized humanists and established the great Florentine library of Greek and Latin cla.s.sics; and the pope proved himself at once the patron and exemplar of the new learning: he enjoyed music and the theater, art and poetry, the masterpieces of the ancients and the creations of his humanistic contemporaries, the spiritual and the witty--life in every form.

[Sidenote: Spread of Humanism]

The zeal for humanism reached its highest pitch in Italy in the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth, but it gradually gained entrance into other countries and at length became the intellectual spirit of sixteenth-century Europe. Greek was first taught both in England and in France about the middle of the fifteenth century. The Italian expeditions of the French kings Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, 1494-1547, served to familiarize Frenchmen with humanism. And the rise of important new German universities called humanists to the Holy Roman Empire. As has been said, humanism dominated all Christian Europe in the sixteenth century.

[Sidenote: Erasmus, Chief Humanist of the Sixteenth Century]

Towering above all his contemporaries was Erasmus, the foremost humanist and the intellectual arbiter of the sixteenth century. Erasmus (1466-1536) was a native of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, but throughout a long and studious life he lived in Germany, France, England, Italy, and Switzerland. He took holy orders in the Church and secured the degree of doctor of sacred theology, but it was as a lover of books and a prolific writer that he earned his t.i.tle to fame.

Erasmus, to an even greater degree than Petrarch, became a great international figure--the scholar of Europe. He corresponded with every important writer of his generation, and he was on terms of personal friendship with Aldus Manutius, the famous publisher of Venice, with Sir Thomas More, the distinguished statesman and scholar of England, with Pope Leo X, with Francis I of France, and with Henry VIII of England. For a time he presided at Paris over the new College of France.

A part of the work of Erasmus--his Greek edition of the New Testament and his _Praise of Folly_--has already been mentioned. In a series of satirical dialogues--the _Adages_ and the _Colloquies_--he displayed a brilliant intellect and a sparkling wit. With quip and jest he made light of the ignorance and credulity of many clergymen, especially of the monks. He laughed at every one, himself included.

"Literary people," said he, "resemble the great figured tapestries of Flanders, which produce effect only when seen from the distance."

[Sidenote: Humanism and Protestantism]

At first Erasmus was friendly with Luther, but as he strongly disapproved of rebellion against the Church, he subsequently a.s.sailed Luther and the whole Protestant movement. He remained outside the group of radical reformers, to the end devoted to his favorite authors, simply a lover of good Latin.

Perhaps the chief reason why Erasmus opposed Protestantism was because he imagined that the theological tempest which Luther aroused all over Catholic Europe would destroy fair-minded scholarship--the very essence of humanism. Be that as it may, the leading humanists of Europe--More in England, Helgesen in Denmark, and Erasmus himself--remained Catholic. And while many of the sixteenth-century humanists of Italy grew skeptical regarding all religion, their country, as we have seen, did not become Protestant but adhered to the Roman Church.

[Sidenote: Decline of Humanism]

Gradually, as the sixteenth century advanced, many persons who in an earlier generation would have applied their minds to the study of Latin or Greek, now devoted themselves to theological discussion or moral exposition. The religious differences between Catholics and Protestants, to say nothing of the refinements of dispute between Calvinists and Lutherans or Presbyterians and Congregationalists, absorbed much of the mental energy of the time and seriously distracted the humanists. In fact, we may say that, from the second half of the sixteenth century, humanism as an independent intellectual interest slowly but steadily declined. Nevertheless, it was not lost, for it was merged with other interests, and with them has been preserved ever since.