The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  Equally important was the French passion for Renaissance writings. This too came late, but once the Sorbonne set up its own press in 1470, French editions and translations of the classics began to appear in large numbers. Robert Gaguin (c. 1433–1501) struck a popular Gallic note by combining Renaissance studies with the burgeoning French nationalism that marked the second half of the fifteenth century. He published his Compendium supra Francorum gestis (1495), a Latin history of France up to the present, taught rhetoric at Paris and produced a treatise on how to enjoy and write Latin verse. He was joined by Guillaume Fichet and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, who toured Italy to pick up the latest scholarship, and by Greek teachers such as Heronymus and Lascaris. Even more influential was Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), who in 1532 published The Right and Proper Institution of the Study of Learning. His theme was that Christendom, itself perfect when pristine, had been buried in “centuries of barbarism,” and it was the task of the present age to “reform the choirs of the antique muses.” The church did not exactly relish this approach, so many of its institutions being associated, in humanist eyes, with the barbarous centuries. Hence when Budé persuaded François I to subsidize the new humanist culture by founding chairs of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, they were grouped in what was called the Collège Royal (later, the Collège de France) outside the control of Paris University. This was the point at which the French literary Renaissance matured, one might almost say exploded.

  Some writers, such as François Rabelais (1483–1553) were educated in the old manner. An ordained priest, he is believed to have attended the ultrastrict Collège de Montaigu of the University of Paris, notorious for its stink, floggings and bad food, known as “the cleft between the buttocks of Mother Church.” Like Erasmus, who also attended it, he was unhappy there, though it must be said that other alumni, such as Jean Cauvin, the great heresiarch, and Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, glorified its teaching—but these judgments tell us as much about the temperaments of the four men as about the institution. Rabelais qualified as a doctor. This was an area where French studies had been revolutionized by contacts and experience during the Italian campaigns. Ambroise Paré (1510–90), who served in one of them, went on to become perhaps the greatest physiologist of the age. He settled in Lyons, a town colonized by Italian bankers—on François I’s death it was said that the crown owed twice its annual income to the Lyons bankers—who brought with them the trappings of the Italian Renaissance. Rabelais wrote extensively in Latin and French on a variety of subjects, including medicine, but it is his seriocomic masterpiece, published over twenty years in five parts but usually known as Gargantua and Pantagruel, a compendium of humanism, bawdy humor, satire and description, that made its way into French hearts. He covered almost every aspect of French society, from peasants to academics, from merchants and lawyers to courtiers, and he wrote vivid, terse, expressive and powerful French, with an enormous vocabulary, using dialect, slang and neologisms. It would be going too far to say he invented French as a literary language, as Dante had invented Italian. Rather, he demonstrated its enormous potentialities and made the French excited about their linguistic heritage for the first time. The church condemned him; civil authorities ordered his books to be prosecuted and burned; the Sorbonne was unremittingly hostile. But the court and the literate people loved both the fun and the savage criticisms of society, and the huge, untidy book served as inspiration to writers as diverse as Molière and Voltaire, besides becoming a byword for iniquity throughout the Anglo-Saxon and northern European world.

  Younger writers benefited from the educational reforms carried out by Budé with François I’s blessing. Jean Dorat, first professor of Greek at the new college, numbered among his pupils Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), who sought to marry knowledge of the classics with the newly mature national tongue and who published, in 1549, the first key work of philology, Defense and Illustration of the French Language, a plea for French poets to write odes and elegies adapted from the classics and to use the new form of the Petrarchan sonnet. His fellow student Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) published his first odes the following year, and the two men, together with their colleague Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–89), who had been born in Venice, the son of the French ambassador, and had absorbed humanism from infancy, constituted a constellation of “new” poets known as the Pléiade. They set the rules for French poetry for nearly three centuries, but they also influenced the drama, for another member of the Pléiade, Étienne Jodelle (1532–88), wrote an epoch-making play, Dido’s Self-Sacrifice, which became the exemplar of French classic theater, thus setting the scene for the glories of the seventeenth century.

  These lively spirits created a language that writers could play with indefinitely and in myriad forms. One of the most enduring was the essay, which lives on today in the critical article and the newspaper and magazine feature. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) was the outstanding product of French humanism, and is still read today all over the world. He was well born, well read, experienced in administration but sufficiently désabusé by the world to devote himself chiefly to letters, which took the form of informal reflections on men, events, customs and beliefs and the common milestones of life—birth, youth, manhood, marriage, sickness and death. He was a Catholic but a skeptic; a practical man but a man of acute feeling too; one who loved the past but was at home in the present and feared not the future. For the first time in European literature, we catch the modern tone, which is easy and conversational, and the willingness to talk about oneself to the reader. The publication of his Essais in 1580 marked the immense distance that the forces of Reformation humanism had now carried the world since the Middle Ages had begun to wane.

  The distance traveled in England was equally great, but the route was different. The English language began its own battle for self-discovery at almost the same time as Italian, in the early fourteenth century, when the use of French by the ruling class, at court, in the law and in administration, was finally replaced by the demotic tongue, English, a process given legal force by the Statute of Pleadings. The Hundred Years’ War with France completed the bifurcation, and it is significant that its early stages coincided with the development of England’s first independent style of Gothic architecture, the Perpendicular. Its first masterpiece was Gloucester Abbey, where the entire east end was rebuilt in the new style, crowned with a giant east window, the largest in England, to celebrate the great English victory over France at Crécy (1346).

  At about this time was born Geoffrey Chaucer, who was to become the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, after Dante himself, and, like Dante, to adumbrate the salient characteristics of Renaissance literature. He came from a family of Ipswich vintners, who traded with Spain, France and Portugal, and like many vintners’ sons (John Ruskin was another example) developed early a wide international outlook, especially in cultural matters. A spell as page to Lionel, one of Edward III’s sons, introduced him to court life. He served in one of the king’s invading armies in France—a country he visited often—and he then joined Edward’s household, the king using him as a diplomatic envoy more than once. Thus he went to Genoa and again to Flanders, and in 1378 he was in Lombardy as part of a mission negotiating with Bernabo Visconti and the great condottiere Sir John Hawkwood “for certain affairs touching the expedition of the King’s war.” Chaucer had already produced a version of the French Roman de la rose and written poetry on his own account. By learning Italian he opened up for himself the new world of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, to each of whom, but especially the second, he was indebted. Even when not abroad he kept in touch with the Continent by virtue of his splendid job as controller of the customs on wool, hides and skins at the port of London. A series of major poems followed, with Boccaccio as his model and supplier of ideas. But Chaucer was entirely his own man and very much an Englishman. Indeed, he was an important Englishman, becoming clerk of the King’s Works and thus in charge of the fabric of the Tower of London, Westmi
nster Palace and eight other royal houses, as well as being justice of the peace and MP for Kent. He thus fitted into the developing Renaissance pattern of the courtly man of affairs who practiced the art of poetry.

  He also shared the Renaissance fascination with the individual human being, as opposed to the archetype or mere category. The individual dominates his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, which he wrote between 1386, when he went into semiretirement in Kent, and his death in 1400. The work has no precise model, for Chaucer had not read The Decameron, and the framework of a Canterbury pilgrimage to the famous shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, with each of a brilliantly varied company telling a tale, is entirely Chaucer’s. More important is the vivid directness with which Chaucer brings out character, both in describing his pilgrims and within the tales they tell. It is the literary equivalent of the formulation of the laws of perspective and foreshortening by the artists of Florence. These men and women jump out from the pages, and live on in the memory, in ways that not even Dante could contrive. There is genius here of an inexplicable kind: Chaucer is one of the four English writers—the other three being Shakespeare, Dickens and Kipling—whose extraordinary ability to peer into the minds of diverse human creatures defies rational explanation and can only be attributed to a mysterious daemon. It is odd that English literature should have suddenly exploded with such a magician.

  But then, that is the nature of culture. We can give all kinds of satisfying explanations of why and when the Renaissance occurred and how it transmitted itself. But there is no explaining Dante, no explaining Chaucer. Genius suddenly comes to life, and speaks out of a vacuum. Then it is silent, equally mysteriously. The trends continue and intensify, but genius is lacking. Chaucer had no successor of anything approaching similar stature. There is no major poet in fifteenthcentury English literature. But the page is not blank. Quite the contrary: there was much solid progress in creating the infrastructure of scholarship and letters. Henry V, greatest of the Plantagenet monarchs and conqueror of France, died young in 1422. His son, Henry VI, was one year old, and the regency fell to his uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Duke Humphrey was a poor ruler, and thus began the weakness and misjudgments that led to the loss of France and the Wars of the Roses. But he was the first English patron of Renaissance learning. He collected the Greek and Latin classics, including most of Aristotle and Plato, in fine manuscripts and beautifully illustrated editions of modern masters, including Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. He bequeathed them all to Oxford University, where they became the nucleus of the future Bodleian Library—indeed, “Duke Humphrey” is still the physical and antiquarian core of the entire institution. In Chaucer’s time, William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, had begun the process of translating England’s newfound wealth, based mainly on wool, into scholarly stones, with his twin foundations of Winchester College and New College, Oxford. Henry VI, a hopeless king but a pious and generous man, continued it with Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. Other colleges followed in stately procession, including All Souls at Oxford, which was to become the English equivalent of the Collège de France, and St. John’s, Cambridge, which from the start specialized in studies dear to Renaissance man.

  The first outstanding English humanist, Robert Flemmyng, visited Italy, where he formed connections at the court of Sixtus IV, the learned pope, and won the friendship of his famous librarian, Platina. To go to Italy became the form. Thomas Linacre (1460–1524) went there to sit at the feet of Poliziano alongside Giovanni de’ Medici, later Pope Leo X, took a medical degree at Padua and came back to found the College of Physicians, write a Latin grammar and act as tutor to royal children. His friend William Grocyn (c. 1446–1519) also studied under Poliziano and the even more learned Greek scholar Chalcondyles. When he returned, he delivered the first public lecture on Greek at Oxford (1491). Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), Thomas More (1478–1535) and John Colet (c. 1467–1519) all studied under Grocyn, Erasmus coming to Oxford in 1498 because, he said, it was no longer necessary to go as far as Italy to pick up the latest in Greek scholarship—Oxford could provide as good or better.

  One feature of English scholarship, at both Oxford and Cambridge, was its spirit of criticism. This is an immensely important point, and is worth dwelling on a little. Of course the critical spirit—that is, the tendency not simply to accept texts at their face value but to examine their provenance, credentials, authenticity and contents with a wary eye—was not invented in Oxford. It was a Renaissance characteristic, and one that was to prove fatal to the unity of the church, once it was applied to sacred texts and ecclesiastical credentials. It long antedated the Renaissance, needless to say. Indeed, it went back to Marcion in the second century A.D., who first subjected the canonical texts of the New Testament to careful exegesis, accepting some and rejecting others. But this kind of approach was rare in the Dark and even in the Middle Ages; it is odd that churchmen-scholars of the caliber of St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas paid so little attention to the integrity and background of the texts that came down to them, and on which they commented so copiously. But so it was. Thus the revival of the skeptical approach of Marcion was one of the most striking aspects of the recovery of antiquity and the most explosive.

  The trail was blazed by Lorenzo Valla (c. 1407–57), a clever, difficult, quarrelsome but also painstaking and exact scholar who specialized in rhetoric and lectured on it in Padua, Rome and Naples. He was a man of affairs, both at the papal court and under Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples. In the periodic struggles between the secular and ecclesiastical forces, he tended to sympathize with princes rather than popes. This led him to examine critically the Donation of Constantine. This document was fabricated sometime between A.D. 750 and 850 and purported to be a record of the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the various principalities he conferred on the then pope, Sylvester I (314–35), and all his successors. It made him primate over all the other Christian churches, with secular dominion over Rome “and all the provinces, places and civitates of Italy and the Western Regions, and supreme judge of their clergy everywhere.” It records that Sylvester was even offered the imperial crown of the West, but refused it. The Donation was the Ur-text of papal triumphalism, the chief credential for the Hildebrandine revolution of the eleventh century and of the even more extreme statement of claim by Boniface VIII in the fourteenth century, as well as the title deeds to the lands of the Papal States in Italy. It had been challenged before, more as a gesture of political defiance by aggrieved monarchs than in a spirit of scholarship. But Valla subjected it to textual scrutiny based upon the principles of what was to become modern historical criticism, and showed, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it was a deliberate forgery. He presented his findings in De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio (1440). Valla had already been in trouble with the church authorities over his criticism of the dialectical teaching techniques of church scholars, especially friars, at the universities. As his exposure of the forgery also went on to make a frontal attack on the temporal power of the papacy, which he argued should be solely a spiritual institution, he was summoned before the Inquisition (1444) and saved only by the intervention of King Alfonso.

  It is not surprising that Valla fell foul of the church, for his approach to all ancient documents was that nothing was sacred and all ought to be examined by the light of a powerful critical candle. He undertook a comparison between St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (Bible translation) and the Greek New Testament. This not only was important in itself and later had a major influence on Erasmus’s textual criticism but encouraged other scholars to do the same, over a whole range of texts. Thus in 1497 John Colet, who had been in Italy for the previous four years gathering information about how to examine ancient texts, gave a sensational and historic series of Oxford lectures on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He abandoned the scholastic approach altogether, and instead placed the Epistle, one of the most central of all Christian documents since it includes the
theology of justification by faith, against its Roman historical background, using pagan authorities like Suetonius. This new historical approach was electrifying for clever young men. It was fresh, catchy, irreverent, iconoclastic and immensely appealing. It was one of those omnium gatherum revolutions in understanding (as was, later, Marx’s class analysis of history or Freud’s theory of the unconscious) that could be made to apply to all kinds of things and problems, with startling results.

  What was developing, in short, was the first great cultural war in European history. One has a vivid glimpse of the future when, sometime between 1511 and 1513, Erasmus and John Colet together visited the famous shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury. This rivaled in wealth and fame the shrine of St. James in Compostela and was surrounded by rackets and fake marvels of all kinds. The two scholars were revolted by what they saw, especially the riches, which Colet said angrily should be given to the poor. He refused to bestow a reverential kiss on a prize relic, the “Arm of St. George,” dismissed a rag supposedly dipped in St. Thomas’s blood “with a whistle of contempt” and exploded when a licensed beggar showered him with holy water and offered him St. Thomas’s shoe to be kissed. He said to Erasmus, “Do these fools expect us to kiss the shoe of every good man who ever lived? Why not bring us their spittle or their dung to be kissed?” It was more than a hundred years since Chaucer’s pilgrims had come to Canterbury, “the holy blissful martyr for to seke,” full of unquestioned faith in his miracle-making capacities. In the meantime the Renaissance had been doing its work. Medieval certitude—or credulity, depending on one’s viewpoint—was now faced with Renaissance scrutiny or skepticism.