In art a complete revolution was effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of ancient models and the study of the principles of their construction.
The manufacture of paper, the discovery of the arts of printing and engraving, multiplied the possession of the treasures of the intelligence and of artistic genius, and combined to make art and literature democratic. What was once confined to a favoured few became common property. New thoughts could act on men in ma.s.ses, and began to move the mult.i.tude. The old mediaeval barriers were broken down, and men came to see that there was more in religion than the mediaeval Church had taught, more in social life than feudalism had manifested, and that knowledge was a manifold unknown to their fathers.
If the Renaissance be the transition from the mediaeval to the modern world,-and it is scarcely possible to regard it otherwise,-then it is one of those great movements of the mind of mankind that almost defy exact description, and there is an elusiveness about it which confounds us when we attempt definition. "It was the emanc.i.p.ation of the reason," says Symonds, "in a race of men, intolerant of control, ready to criticise canons of conduct, enthusiastic of antique liberty, freshly awakened to the sense of beauty, and anxious above all things to secure for themselves free scope in spheres outside the region of authority. Men so vigorous and independent felt the joy of exploration. There was no problem they feared to face, no formula they were not eager to recast according to their new conceptions."(17) It was the blossoming and fructifying of the European intellectual life; but perhaps it ought to be added that it contained a new conception of the universe in which religion consisted less in a feeling of dependence on G.o.d, and more in a faith on the possibilities lying in mankind.
-- 2. The Revival of Literature and Art.
But the Renaissance has generally a more limited meaning, and one defined by the most potent of the new forces which worked for the general intellectual regeneration. It means the revival of learning and of art consequent on the discovery and study of the literary and artistic masterpieces of antiquity. It is perhaps in this more limited sense that the movement more directly prepared the way for the Reformation and what followed, and deserves more detailed examination. It was the discovery of a lost means of culture and the consequent awakening and diffusion of a literary, artistic, and critical spirit.
A knowledge of ancient Latin literature had not entirely perished during the earlier Middle Ages. The Benedictine monasteries had preserved cla.s.sical ma.n.u.scripts-especially the monastery of Monte Ca.s.sino for the southern, and that of Fulda for the northern parts of Europe. These monasteries and their sister establishments were schools of learning as well as libraries, and we read of more than one where the study of some of the cla.s.sical authors was part of the regular training. Virgil, Horace, Terence and Martial, Livy, Suetonius and Sall.u.s.t, were known and studied.
Greek literature had not survived to anything like the same extent, but it had never entirely disappeared from Southern Europe, and especially from Southern Italy. Ever since the days of the Roman Republic in that part of the Italian peninsula once called Magna Graecia, Greek had been the language of many of the common people, as it is to this day, in districts of Calabria and of Sicily; and the teachers and students of the mediaeval University of Salerno had never lost their taste for its study.(18) But with all this, the fourteenth century, and notably the age of Petrarch, saw the beginnings of new zeal for the literature of the past, and was really the beginning of a new era.
Italy was the first land to become free from the conditions of mediaeval life, and ready to enter on the new life which was awaiting Europe. There was an Italian language, the feeling of distinct nationality, a considerable advance in civilisation, an acc.u.mulation of wealth, and, during the age of the despots, a comparative freedom from constant changes in political conditions.
Dante"s great poem, interweaving as it does the imagery and mysticism of Giacchino di Fiore, the deepest spiritual and moral teaching of the mediaeval Church, and the insight and judgment on men and things of a great poet, was the first sign that Italy had wakened from the sleep of the Middle Ages. Petrarch came next, the pa.s.sionate student of the lives, the thoughts, and emotions of the great masters of cla.s.sical Latin literature.
They were real men for him, his own Italian ancestors, and they as he had felt the need of h.e.l.lenic culture to solace their souls, and serve for the universal education of the human race. Boccaccio, the third leader in the awakening, preached the joy of living, the universal capacity for pleasure, and the sensuous beauty of the world. He too, like Petrarch, felt the need of h.e.l.lenic culture. For both there was an awakening to the beauty of literary form, and the conviction that a study of the ancient cla.s.sics would enable them to achieve it. Both valued the vision of a new conception of life derived from the perusal of the cla.s.sics, freer, more enlarged and joyous, more rational than the Middle Ages had witnessed.
Petrarch and Boccaccio yearned after the life thus disclosed, which gave unfettered scope to the play of the emotions, to the sense of beauty, and to the manifold activity of the human intelligence.
Learned Greeks were induced to settle in Italy-men who were able to interpret the ancient Greek poets and prose writers-Manuel Chrysoloras (at Florence, 1397-1400), George of Trebizond, Theodore Gaza (whose Greek _Grammar_ Erasmus taught from while in England), Gemistos Plethon, a distinguished Platonist, under whom the Christian Platonism received its impulse, and John Argyropoulos, who was the teacher of Reuchlin. The men of the early Renaissance were their pupils.
-- 3. Its earlier relation to Christianity.
There was nothing hostile to Christianity or to the mediaeval Church in the earlier stages of this intellectual revival, and very little of the neo-paganism which it developed afterwards. Many of the instincts of mediaeval piety remained, only the objects were changed. Petrarch revered the MS. of Homer, which he could not read, as an ancestor of his might have venerated the scapulary of a saint.(19) The men of the early Renaissance made collections of MSS. and inscriptions, of cameos and of coins, and worshipped them as if they had been relics. The Medicean Library was formed about 1450, the Vatican Library in 1453, and the age of pa.s.sionate collection began.
The age of scholarship succeeded, and Italian students began to interpret the ancient cla.s.sical authors with a mysticism all their own. They sought a means of reconciling Christian thought with ancient pagan philosophy, and, like Clement of Alexandria and Origen, discovered it in Platonism.
Platonic academies were founded, and Cardinal Bessarion, Marsiglio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola became the Christian Platonists of Italy. Of course, in their enthusiasm they went too far. They appropriated the whole intellectual life of a pagan age, and adopted its ethical as well as its intellectual perceptions, its basis of sensuous pleasures, and its joy in sensuous living. Still their main thought was to show that h.e.l.lenism as well as Judaism was a pathway to Christianity, and that the Sibyl as well as David was a witness for Christ.
The Papacy lent its patronage to the revival of literature and art, and put itself at the head of the movement of intellectual life. Pope Nicolas V. (1447-1455) was the first Bishop of Rome who fostered the Renaissance, and he himself may be taken as representing the sincerity, the simplicity, and the lofty intellectual and artistic aims of its earliest period.
Sprung from an obscure family belonging to Saranza, a small town near Spezzia, and cast on his own resources before he had fairly quitted boyhood, he had risen by his talents and his character to the highest position in the Church. He had been private tutor, secretary, librarian, and through all a genuine lover of books. They were the only personal luxury he indulged in, and perhaps no one in his days knew more about them. He was the confidential adviser of Lorenzo de Medici when he founded his great library in San Marco. He himself began the Vatican Library. He had agents who ransacked the monasteries of Europe, and he collected the literary relics which had escaped destruction in the sack of Constantinople. Before his death his library in the Vatican contained more than 5000 MSS. He gathered round him a band of ill.u.s.trious artists and scholars. He filled Rome with skilled and artistic artisans, with decorators, jewellers, workers in painted gla.s.s and embroidery. The famous Leo Alberti was one of his architects, and Fra Angelico one of his artists. Laurentius Valla and Poggio Bracciolini, Cardinal Bessarion and George of Trebizond, were among his scholars. He directed and inspired their work. Valla"s critical attacks on the Donation of Constantine, and on the tradition that the Twelve had dictated the Apostles" Creed, did not shake his confidence in the scholar. The princ.i.p.al Greek authors were translated into Latin by his orders. Europe saw theology, learning, and art lending each other mutual support under the leadership of the head of the Church. Perhaps Julius II. (1503-1513) conceived more definitely than even Nicolas had done that one duty of the head of the Church was to a.s.sume the leadership of the intellectual and artistic movement which was making wider the thought of Europe,-only his restless energy never permitted him leisure to give effect to his conception. "The instruction which Pope Julius II. gave to Michelangelo to represent him as Moses can bear but one interpretation: that Julius set himself the mission of leading forth Israel (the Church) from its state of degradation, and showing it-though he could not grant possession-the Promised Land at least from afar, that blessed land which consists in the enjoyment of the highest intellectual benefits, and the training and consecration of all the faculties of man"s mind to union with G.o.d."(20)
The cla.s.sical revival in Italy soon exhausted itself. Its sensuous perceptions degenerated into sensuality, its instinct for the beauty of expression into elegant trifling, and its enthusiasm for antiquity into neo-paganism. It failed almost from the first in real moral earnestness; scarcely saw, and still less understood, how to cure the deep-seated moral evils of the age.
Italy had given birth to the Renaissance, but it soon spread to the more northern lands. Perhaps France first felt the impulse, then Germany and England last of all. In dealing with the Reformation, the movement in Germany is the most important.
The Germans, throughout the Middle Ages, had continuous and intimate relations with the southern peninsula, and in the fifteenth century these were stronger than ever. German merchants had their factories in Venice and Genoa; young German n.o.bles destined for a legal or diplomatic career studied law at Italian universities; students of medicine completed their studies in the famous southern schools; and the German wandering student frequently crossed the Alps to pick up additional knowledge. There was such constant scholarly intercourse between Germany and Italy, that the New Learning could not fail to spread among the men of the north.
-- 4. The Brethren of the Common Lot.
Germany and the Low Countries had been singularly prepared for that revival of letters, art, and science which had come to Italy. One of the greatest gifts bestowed by the Mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on their native land had been an excellent system of school education. Gerard Groot, a disciple of the Flemish mystic Jan van Rysbroeck, had, after long consultations with his Master, founded a brotherhood called the _Brethren of the Common Life_,(21) whose aim was to better the religious condition of their fellow-men by the multiplication of good books and by the careful training of the young. They were to support themselves by copying and selling ma.n.u.scripts. All the houses of the Brethren had a large room, where a number of scribes sat at tables, a reader repeated slowly the words of the ma.n.u.script, and books were multiplied as rapidly as was possible before the invention of printing.
They filled their own libraries with the best books of Christian and pagan antiquity. They multiplied small tracts containing the mystical and practical theology of the _Friends of G.o.d_, and sent them into circulation among the people. One of the intimate followers of Groot, Florentius Radewynsohn, proved to be a distinguished educationalist, and the schools of the Order soon became famous. The Brethren, to use the words of their founder, employed education for the purpose of "raising spiritual pillars in the Temple of the Lord." They insisted on a study of the Vulgate in their cla.s.ses; they placed German translations of Christian authors in the hands of their pupils; they took pains to give them a good knowledge of Latin, and read with them selections from the best known ancient authors; they even taught a little Greek; and their scholars learned to sing the simpler, more evangelical Latin hymns.
The mother school was at Deventer, a town situated at the south-west corner of the great episcopal territory of Utrecht, now the Dutch province of Ober-Yessel. It lies on the bank of that branch of the Rhine (the Yessel) which flowing northwards glides past Zutphen, Deventer, Zwolle, and loses itself in the Zuyder Zee at Kampen. A large number of the more distinguished leaders of the fifteenth century owed their early training to this great school at Deventer. During the last decades of the fifteenth century the headmaster was Alexander Hegius (1433-1498), who came to Deventer in 1471 and remained there until his death.(22) The school reached its height of fame under this renowned master, who gathered 2000 pupils around him,-among them Erasmus, Conrad Mutti (Mutia.n.u.s Rufus), Hermann von Busch, Johann Murmellius,-and, rejecting the older methods of grammatical instruction, taught them to know the niceties of the Latin tongue by leading them directly to the study of the great writers of cla.s.sical antiquity. He was such an indefatigable student that he kept himself awake during the night-watches, it is said, by holding in his hands the candle which lighted him, in order to be wakened by its fall should slumber overtake him. The glory of Deventer perished with this great teacher, who to the last maintained the ancient traditions of the school by his maxim, that learning without piety was rather a curse than a blessing.
Other famous schools of the Brethren in the second half of the fifteenth century were Schlettstadt,(23) in Elsa.s.s, some miles from the west bank of the Rhine, and about half-way between Stra.s.sburg and Basel; Munster on the Ems, the Monasterium of the earlier Middle Ages; Emmerich, a town on the Rhine near the borders of Holland, and Altmarck, in the north-west.
Schlettstadt, under its master Ludwig Dringenberg, almost rivalled the fame of Deventer, and many of the members of the well-known Stra.s.sburg circle which gathered round Jacob Wimpheling, Sebastian Brand, and the German Savonarola, John Geiler von Keysersberg, had been pupils in this school. Besides these more famous establishments, the schools of the Brethren spread all over Germany. The teachers were commonly called the _Roll-Brueder_, and under this name they had a school in Magdeburg to which probably Luther was sent when he spent a year in that town. Their work was so pervading and their teaching so effectual, that we are informed by chroniclers, who had nothing to do with the Brethren, that in many German towns, girls could be heard singing the simpler Latin hymns, and that the children of artisans could converse in Latin.
-- 5. German Universities, Schools, and Scholarship.
The desire for education spread all over Germany in the fifteenth century.
Princes and burghers vied with each other in erecting seats of learning.
Within one hundred and fifty years no fewer than seventeen new universities were founded. Prag, a Bohemian foundation, came into existence in 1348. Then followed four German foundations, Vienna, in 1365 or 1384; Heidelberg, in 1386; Koln, in 1388; and Erfurt, established by the townspeople, in 1392. In the fifteenth century there were Leipzig, in 1409; Rostock, on the sh.o.r.e of what was called the East Sea, almost opposite the south point of Sweden, in 1419; Cracow, a Polish foundation, in 1420; Greifswald, in 1456; Freiburg and Trier, in 1457; Basel, in 1460; Ingolstadt, founded with the special intention of training students in obedience to the Pope, a task singularly well accomplished, in 1472; Tubingen and Mainz, in 1477; Wittenberg, in 1502; and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, in 1507. Marburg, the first Reformation University, was founded in 1527.
The craving for education laid hold on the burgher cla.s.s, and towns vied with each other in providing superior schools, with teachers paid out of the town"s revenues. Some German towns had several such foundations.
Breslau, "the student"s paradise," had seven. Nor was the education of girls neglected. Frankfurt-on-the-Main founded a high school for girls early in the fifteenth century, and insisted that the teachers were to be learned ladies who were not nuns.(24) Besides the cla.s.srooms, the towns usually provided hostels, where the boys got lodging and sometimes firewood (they were expected to obtain food by begging through the streets of the town), and frequently hospitals where the scholars could be tended in illness.(25)
These possibilities of education attracted boys from all parts of the country, and added a new cla.s.s of vagrants to the tramps of all kinds who infested the roads during the later Middle Ages. The wandering scholar, with his yellow scarf, was a feature of the era, and frequently not a reputable one. He was usually introduced as a character into the _Fastnachtspiele_, or rude popular carnival comedies, and was almost always a rogue and often a thief. Children of ten and twelve years of age left their villages, in charge of an older student, to join some famous school. But these older students were too often mere vagrants, with just learning enough to impose upon the simple peasantry, to whom they sold charms against toothache and other troubles. The young children entrusted to them by confiding parents were often treated with the greatest cruelty, employed by them to beg or steal food, and sent round to the public-houses with cans to beg for beer. The small unfortunates were the prisoners, the slaves, of their disreputable masters, and many of them died by the roadside. We need not wonder that Luther, with his memory full of these wandering students, in after days denounced the system by which men spent sometimes "twenty and even forty years" in a so-called student life, which was often one of the lowest vagrancy and debauchery, and in the end knew neither German nor Latin, "to say nothing," he adds with honest indignation, "of the shameful and vicious life by which our worthy youth have been so grievously corrupted." Two or three of the autobiographies of these wandering students have survived; and two of them, those of Thomas Platter and of Johann Butzbach, belong to Luther"s time, and give a vivid picture of their lives.(26)
Germany had no lack of schools and universities, but it can scarcely be said that they did more than serve as a preparation for the entrance of the Renaissance movement. During the fifteenth century all the Universities were under the influence of the Church, and Scholasticism prescribed the methods of study. Very little of the New Learning was allowed to enter. It is true that if Koln and perhaps Ingolstadt be excepted, the Scholastic which was taught represented what were supposed to be the more advanced opinions-those of John Duns Scotus, William of Occam, and Gabriel Biel, rather than the learning of Thomas Aquinas and other great defenders of papal traditions; but it lent itself as thoroughly as did the older Scholastic to the discussion of all kinds of verbal and logical subtleties. Knowledge of every kind was discussed under formulae and phrases sanctioned by long scholastic use. It is impossible to describe the minute distinctions and the intricate reasoning based upon them without exceeding the s.p.a.ce at our disposal. It is enough to say that the prevailing course of study furnished an imposing framework without much solid content, and provided an intellectual gymnastic without much real knowledge. A survival can be seen in the Formal Logic still taught.
The quant.i.ty of misspent ingenuity called forth to produce the figures and moods, and bestowed on discovering and arranging all possible moods under each figure and in providing all with mnemonic names,-_Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris_, etc.,-affords some insight into the scholastic methods in use in these universities of the fifteenth century.
Then it must be remembered that the scholarship took a quasi-ecclesiastical form. The universities were all monastic inst.i.tutions, where the teachers were professional and the students amateur celibates. The scholars were gathered into hostels in which they lived with their teachers, and were taught to consider themselves very superior persons. The statutes of mediaeval Oxford declare that G.o.d created "clerks" with gifts of intelligence denied to mere lay persons; that it behoved "clerks" to exhibit this difference by their outward appearance; and that the university tailors, whose duty it was to make men _extrinsecus_ what G.o.d had made them _intrinsecus_, were to be reckoned as members of the University. Those mediaeval students sometimes a.s.sumed airs which roused the pa.s.sions of the laity, and frequently led to tremendous riots. Thus in 1513 the townsfolk of Erfurt battered in the gates of the University with cannon, and after the flight of the professors and students destroyed almost all the archives and library. About the same time some citizens of Vienna having jeered at the sacred student dress, there ensued the "Latin war," which literally devastated the town. This pride of separation between "clerks" and laity culminated in the great annual procession, when the newly capped graduates, clothed in all the glory of new bachelors" and masters" gowns and hoods, marched through the princ.i.p.al streets of the university town, in the midst of the university dignitaries and frequently attended by the magistrates in their robes.
Young Luther confessed that when he first saw the procession at Erfurt he thought that no position on earth was more enviable than that of a newly capped graduate.
Mediaeval ecclesiastical tradition brooded over all departments of learning; and the philosophy and logic, or what were supposed to be the philosophy and logic, of Aristotle ruled that tradition. The reverence for the name of Aristotle almost took the form of a religious fervour. In a curious mediaeval _Life of Aristotle_ the ancient pagan thinker is declared to be a forerunner of Christ. All who refused to accept his guidance were heretics, and his formal scheme of thought was supposed to justify the refined sophisms of mediaeval dialectic. His system of thought was the fortified defence which preserved the old and protected it from the inroads of the New Learning. Hence the hatred which almost all the German Humanists seem to have had for the name of Aristotle. The att.i.tudes of the partisans of the old and of the new towards the ancient Greek thinker are represented in two pictures, each instinct with the feeling of the times.
In one, in the church of the Dominicans in Pisa, Aristotle is represented standing on the right with Plato on the left of Thomas Aquinas, and rays streaming from their opened books make a halo round the head of the great mediaeval theologian and thinker. In the other, a woodcut published by Hans Holbein the younger in 1527, Aristotle with the mediaeval doctors is represented descending into the abodes of darkness, while Jesus Christ stands in the foreground and points out the true light to a crowd of people, among whom the artist has figured peasants with their flails.
-- 6. The earlier German Humanists.
When the beginnings of the New Learning made their appearance in Germany, they did not bring with them any widespread revival of culture. There was no outburst, as in Italy, of the artistic spirit, stamping itself upon such arts as painting, sculpture, and architecture, which could appeal to the whole public intelligence. The men who first felt the stirrings of the new intellectual life were, for the most part, students who had been trained in the more famous schools of the _Brethren of the Common Life_, all of whom had a serious aim in life. The New Learning appealed to them not so much a means of self-culture as an instrument to reform education, to criticise antiquated methods of instruction, and, above all, to effect reforms in the Church and to purify the social life. One of the most conspicuous of such scholars was Cardinal Nicolas Cusa.n.u.s(27) (1401-1464).
He was a man of singularly open mind, who, while he was saturated with the old learning, was able to appreciate the new. He had studied the cla.s.sics in Italy. He was an expert mathematician and astronomer. Some have even a.s.serted that he antic.i.p.ated the discoveries of Galileo. The instruments with which he worked, roughly made by a village tinsmith, may still be seen preserved in the Brother-house which he founded at his birthplace, Cues, on the Mosel; and there, too, the sheets, covered with his long calculations for the reform of the calendar, may still be studied.
Another scholar, sent out by the same schools, was John Wessel of Groningen (1420-1489), who wandered in search of learning from Koln to Paris and from Paris to Italy. He finally settled down as a canon in the Brotherhood of Mount St. Agnes. There he gathered round him a band of young students, whom he encouraged to study Greek and Hebrew. He was a theologian who delighted to criticise the current opinions on theological doctrines. He denied that the fire of Purgatory could be material fire, and he theorised about indulgences in such a way as to be a forerunner of Luther.(28) "If I had read his books before," said Luther, "my enemies might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything from Wessel, so great is the agreement between our spirits. I feel my joy and my strength increase, I have no doubt that I have taught aright, when I find that one who wrote at a different time, in another clime, and with a different intention, agrees so entirely in my view and expresses it in almost the same words."
Other like-minded scholars might be mentioned, Rudolph Agricola(29) (1442-1485), Jacob Wimpheling(30) (1450-1528), and Sebastian Brand (1457-1521), who was town-clerk of Stra.s.sburg from 1500, and the author of the celebrated _Ship of Fools_, which was translated into many languages, and was used by his friend Geiler of Keysersberg as the text for one of his courses of popular sermons.
All these men, and others like-minded and similarly gifted, are commonly regarded as the precursors of the German Renaissance, and are cla.s.sed among the German Humanists. Yet it may be questioned whether they can be taken as the representatives of that kind of Humanism which gathered round Luther in his student days, and of which Ulrich von Hutten, the stormy petrel of the times of the Reformation, was a notable example. Its beginnings must be traced to other and less reputable pioneers. Numbers of young German students, with the talent for wandering and for supporting themselves by begging possessed by so many of them, had tramped down to Italy, where they contrived to exist precariously while they attended, with a genuine thirst for learning, the cla.s.ses taught by Italian Humanists. There they became infected with the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and learned also to despise the ordinary restraints of moral living. There they imbibed a contempt for the Church and for all kinds of theology, and acquired the genuine temperament of the later Italian Humanists, which could be irreligious without being anti-religious, simply because religion of any sort was something foreign to their nature.
Such a man was Peter Luders (1415-1474). He began life as an ecclesiastic, wandered down into Italy, where he devoted himself to cla.s.sical studies, and where he acquired the irreligious disposition and the disregard for ordinary moral living which disgraced a large part of the later Italian Humanists. While living at Padua (1444), where he acted as private tutor to some young Germans from the Palatinate, he was invited by the Elector to teach Latin in the University of Heidelberg. The older professors were jealous of him: they insisted on reading and revising his introductory lecture: they refused him the use of the library; and in general made his life a burden. He struggled on till 1460. Then he spent many years in wandering from place to place, teaching the cla.s.sics privately to such scholars as he could find. He was not a man of reputable life, was greatly given to drink, a free liver in every way, and thoroughly irreligious, with a strong contempt for all theology. He seems to have contrived when sober to keep his heretical opinions to himself, but to have betrayed himself occasionally in his drinking bouts. When at Basel he was accused of denying the doctrine of Three Persons in the G.o.dhead, and told his accusers that he would willingly confess to four if they would only let him alone. He ended his days as a teacher of medicine in Vienna.
History has preserved the names of several of these wandering scholars who sowed the seeds of cla.s.sical studies in Germany, and there were, doubtless, many who have been forgotten. Loose living, irreligious, their one gift a genuine desire to know and impart a knowledge of the ancient cla.s.sical literature, careless how they fared provided only they could study and teach Latin and Greek, they were the disreputable apostles of the New Learning, and in their careless way scattered it over the northern lands.
-- 7. The Humanist Circles in the Cities.