Ideas
Page 147
82. Ibid., page 209.
83. Ibid., page 214. See also: Schachner, Op. cit., pages 322ff.
84. Cobban, Op. cit., page 215.
85. Crosby, Op. cit., page 19. This may have been aided by what Jacques le Goff calls the new education of the memory, brought about by Lateran IV’s requirement for the faithful to make confession once a year. Le Goff also says that preaching became more precise at this time. Op. cit., page 80.
86. Crosby, Op. cit., pages 28–29.
87. Ibid., page 33.
88. Ibid., page 36.
89. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford and London: Stanford University Press, 1997, page 136.
90. Crosby, Op. cit., page 42. Numbers still had their mystical side. Six was perfect because God made the world in six days, seven was perfect because it was the sum of the first odd and the first even number, and because God had rested on the seventh day after the Creation. Ten, the number of the commandments, stood for law, whereas eleven, going beyond the law, stood for sin. The number 1,000 also represented perfection because it was the number of the commandments multiplied by itself three times over, three being the number of the Trinity and the number of days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Ibid., page 46.
91. Jacques le Goff, ‘The town as an agent of Civilisation, 1200–1500’, in Carlo M. Cipolla (editor), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1976–1977, page 91.
92. Crosby, Op. cit., page 57.
93. Saenger, Op. cit., pages 12, 17 and 65. John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Review/Headline, 2002, pages 108–110.
94. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 118. Crosby, Op. cit., page 136. Saenger, Op. cit., page 250.
95. A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pages 147–150. See Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, Op. cit., pages 12–14, for medieval ideas of space and time.
96. Crosby, Op. cit., page 82.
97. Ibid., page 101. Jacques le Goff says there was a great wave of anti-intellectualism at this time which retarded the acceptance of some of these innovations. Jacques le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pages 136–138.
98. Crosby, Op. cit., page 113.
99. The German marks fought for supremacy with and throughout the sixteenth century and were not finally adopted until the French algebraists used them.
100. Crosby, Op. cit., page 117.
101. Ibid., page 120.
102. Charles M. Radding, A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society, 400–1200, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985, page 188.
103. Piltz, Op. cit., page 21.
104. Crosby, Op. cit., page 146.
105. Albert Gallo, Music of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, volume 2, pages 11–12.
106. In particular a form of syncopation known as the hoquet, a French word for the technique where one voice sang while another rested, and vice versa rapidly. Hoquet eventually became the English word ‘hiccup’. Crosby, Op. cit., page 158.
107. Piltz, Op. cit., pages 206–207.
108. Man, Op. cit., page 87, for the demand stimulated by universities.
109. Crosby, Op. cit., page 215. In intellectual terms, the disputation was perhaps the most important innovation of the university, allowing the students to see that authority isn’t everything. In an era of ecclesiastical domination and canon law, this was crucial. The exemplar system of manuscript circulation also enabled more private study, another important aid to the creative student, and something which would be augmented by the arrival of the printed book at the end of the fifteenth century.
110. Even so, a country like France easily produced 100,000 bundles of vellum a year, each bundle containing forty skins. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 18.
111. Ibid., page 20.
112. Man, Op. cit., pages 135–136.
113. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 50. For early presses see: Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001, pages 10ff.
114. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 54. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341.
115. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 56. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341 on the print quality of early books.
116. Douglas MacMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941, pages 208ff.
117. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 81. See McGrath, Op. cit., page 13, for Gutenberg’s type.
118. Martin Lowry, ‘The Manutius publicity campaign’, in David S. Zeidberg and F. G. Superbi (editors), Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998, pages 31ff.
119. McGrath, Op. cit., page 15, for early edition sizes.
120. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 162.
121. The first move was when publishers agreed not to print a second edition of a book without the author’s permission, which was only granted on payment of a further sum. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 164.
122. Ibid., page 217.
123. McGrath, Op. cit., page 18, says the price of a Gutenberg Bible was equivalent to that of a large town house in a German city in 1520. From the start, books were were sold at book fairs all over Europe. Lyons was one, partly because it had many trade fairs and merchants were familiar with the process. It was also a major crossroads, with important bridges over the Rhône and Saône. In addition, to preserve the fair, the king gave the merchants in Lyons certain privileges–for example, no merchant was obliged to open his account books for inspection. Some forty-nine booksellers and printers were established in the city, mainly along the rue Mercière, though many of them were foreign. This meant that books in many languages were bought and sold at the Lyons book fair and the city became an important centre for the spread of ideas. (Law books were especially popular.) The main rival was at Frankfurt (not far from Mainz). There too there were many trade fairs–wine, spices, horses, hops, metals. Booksellers arrived at the turn of the sixteenth century, together with publishers from Venice, Paris, Antwerp and Geneva. During the fair they were grouped in the Büchergasse, ‘Book Street’, between the river Main and St Leonard’s church. New publications were advertised at Frankfurt, where the publisher’s catalogue seems to have started, and it also became known as a market in printing equipment. Thus Frankfurt slowly became a centre for everyone engaged in the book trade–as it still is for two weeks every year in October. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin went through these Frankfurt book catalogues in their study on the impact of the book and they found that, between 1564 and 1600, more than 20,000 different titles were on offer, published by 117 firms in sixty-one towns. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) had a catastrophic effect on book production and on the Frankfurt fair. Instead, political conditions favoured the Leipzig book fair and it would be some time before Frankfurt regained its pre-eminence. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 231.
124. Ibid., page 244.
125. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods, London: Macmillan, 1996, pages 172–173.
126. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 246.
127. Ibid., page 248.
128. See for example, Ralph Hexter, ‘Aldus, Greek, and the shape of the “classical corpus”’, in Zeidberg and Superbi (editors), Op. cit., page 143ff.
129. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 273. See McGrath, Op. cit., pages 24ff and 253ff, for the rise of vernacular languages caused by printing.
130. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 319.
131. Ibid., page 324. See McGrath, Op. cit., page 258, for Robert Cawdry’s The Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (1604), which listed 2,500 unusual or borrowed words.
132. Hexter says Aldus promoted Greek as well as Latin. Hexter, Op. cit., page 158.
CHAPTER 18: THE ARRIVAL OF THE SECULAR: CAPITALISM, HUMANISM, INDIVIDUALISM
1. Jardine, Worldly Goods, Op. cit., pages 13–15.
3. Charles Homer Haskins, The Twelfth Century Renaissance, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927, though William Chester Jordan, in Europe in the High Middle Ages, Op. cit., page 120, wonders whether the twelfth century just saw ‘an exceptional series of towering figures’.
4. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960, pages 3, 25 and 162.
5. Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague, New York: HarperCollins, 2001, page 203.
6. Ibid., pages 204–205. For Florence and the plague, see Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983, pages 40ff.
7. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300–1600, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, page 410.
8. Ibid., page 43.
9. Ibid., pages 122–124.
10. Ibid., pages 72–73.
11. Ibid., pages 310–311.
12. Ibid., pages 318–319.
13. Hall, Cities in Civilisation, Op. cit., 1998, page 78.
14. R. A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pages 20–22.
15. Gene Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962, pages 33ff, for the old- and new-style merchants.
16. G. Holmes, Florence, Rome and the Origin of the Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, page 39. See also: Brucker, Op. cit., page 71.
17. R. S. Lopez, ‘The trade of medieval Europe: the south’, in M. Postan et al, (editors), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, volume 2: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1952, pages 257ff.
18. Hall, Op. cit., page 81.
19. J. Lamer, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch: 1216–1380, London: Longman, 1980, page 223.
20. Hall, Op. cit., page 81. The woollen industry showed different aspects of fledgling capitalism. For example, most of the 200 woollen companies were associations of two or more lanaiuoli, entrepreneurs who provided the capital for the plant’s operation, but rarely got involved in management, which was done by a salaried factor who might have as many as 150 people under him–dyers, fullers, weavers and spinners. In the 1427 census, wool merchants were the third most numerous profession in Florence after shoemakers and notaries. The spirit of capitalism was also evident from the growing concentration into fewer and larger firms, which reduced in number between 1308 and 1338 from 300 to 200. ‘Fortunes were made but there were also many bankruptcies.’ Ibid., page 83 and Lamer, Op. cit., page 197.
21. Hall, Op. cit., page 84. See Brucker, Op. cit., page 105, for the arrogance of the Bardi family.
22. Hall, Op. cit., page 85.
23. Brucker, Op. cit., page 105 for the conflict between mercantile and noble values.
24. Hall, Op. cit., page 101.
25. Ibid., page 87.
26. See Brucker, Op. cit., pages 217–218, for the convegni of like-minded groups.
27. Hall, Op. cit., pages 94–95.
28. Ibid., page 98.
29. For painters and sculptors, the fundamental unit was the bottega or workshop, often producing a variety of objects. Botticelli, for instance, produced cassoni or wedding chests and banners. And masters worked with assistants, like modern artisans. Ghirlandaio, Raphael and Perugino all had workshops, which were often family affairs. Hall, Op. cit., pages 102–103 and M. Wackenagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Market, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, pages 309–310. Translation: A. Luchs.
30. Brucker, Op. cit., pages 215–216.
31. Hall, Op. cit., page 108.
32. Brucker, Op. cit., page 26.
33. Hall, Op. cit., pages 98 and 106.
34. Ibid., page 108.
35. Brucker, Op cit., pages 214–215, for the role of Dante.
36. D. Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977, page 139.
37. Hall, Op. cit., page 110.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., page 371.
40. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pages 7–8.
41. Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, Op. cit., page 212.
42. Brucker, Op. cit., pages 226–227.
43. James Haskins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990, volume 1, page 95.
44. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (two volumes), Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1955, volume 1, page 38.
45. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 101. Some scholars have doubted that the academy ever existed.
46. Ibid. One reason Ficino found Plato so congenial, rather than Aristotle (over and above the fact that the texts were newly available), was his belief that ‘deeds sway us more than the accounts of deeds’ and that ‘exemplary lives’ (the Socratic way of life) are better teachers than the moral instruction of Aristotle.
47. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 214; Brucker, Op. cit., page 228. Haskins, Op. cit., page 295.
48. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 216. Haskins, Op. cit., page 283.
49. Barnes, Op. cit., page 556.
50. Ibid., page 558.
51. A. J. Krailsheimer, ‘Erasmus’, in A. J. Krailsheimer (editor), The Continental Renaissance, London: Penguin Books, 1971, pages 393–394.
52. McGrath, Op. cit., pages 253ff. See also: Krailsheimer (editor), Op. cit., page 478ff, for Montaigne.
53. Barnes, Op. cit., page 563.
54. Ibid.
55. Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, Op. cit., page 61.
56. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 77.
57. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 67.
58. Krailsheimer (editor), Op. cit., pages 388–389, for the background to Adages and its success.
59. Barnes, Op. cit., page 564.
60. Ibid., page 565.
61. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 72. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 339, for what Erasmus wrote elsewhere about Luther.
62. Francis Ames-Lewis and Mary Rogers (editors), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, page 203.
63. PeterBurke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 1420–1540, London: Batsford, 1972, page 189.
64. Ibid., page 191.
65. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 17.
66. Burke, Op. cit., page 191.
67. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 11.
68. Ibid., pages 19–20. Even the economic records of the Datini family, referred to earlier, were kept for ‘posterity’, as if they equated to some sort of literary archive in which money was the equivalent of poetry. Ibid., pages 42–43.
69. Ibid., page 62.
70. Burke, Op. cit., page 194. And see Brucker, Op. cit., page 100 for criticism of Burckhardt and the conclusions he draws.
71. Burke, Op. cit., page 195.
72. Ibid., page 197.
73. Hall, Op. cit., page 90. Brucker, Op. cit., pages 218–220, for universities and tolerance in Florence.
74. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 225.
75. Peter Burke, Introduction to Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, London: Penguin Books, 1990, page 13.
76. They even felt they could conquer death, in the sense of gaining a measure of fame that would outlive them, and cause them to be remembered. In fifteenth-century tomb sculpture, for example, the macabre is almost totally absent. Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, Op. cit., page 201.
77. Ibid., page
200. See Brucker, Op. cit., pages 223–225, for Bracciolini and Florentine attitudes to money and fame.
78. Burke, Op. cit., page 201.
CHAPTER 19: THE EXPLOSION OF IMAGINATION
1. There are many accounts. See, for example: Herbert Lucas SJ, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, London: Sands & Co., 1899, pages 40ff; and see Pierre van Paassen, A Crown of Fire: The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, London: Hutchinson, 1961, pages 173ff, for other tactics of Savonarola.