Chapter 5 — Changing Cultural Traditions

From the nineteenth century, historians used the term 'Renaissance' (literally, rebirth) to describe the cultural changes of this period. The historian who emphasised these most was the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) of the University of Basle in Switzerland, who wrote The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860.

Italian towns revived because of expanding trade between the Byzantine Empire and Islamic countries, making coastal ports important. From the twelfth century, as Mongols opened up trade with China via the Silk Route and trade with western European countries also increased, Italian towns played a central role. Florence and Venice were republics; many others were court-cities ruled by princes.

By the early fifteenth century, the term 'humanist' was used for masters who taught grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. These subjects emphasised skills developed by individuals through discussion and debate, and were not connected with religion. The Latin word humanitas, from which 'humanities' was derived, had been used by the Roman lawyer and essayist Cicero (106–43 BCE) to mean culture.

Arab translators carefully preserved and translated ancient manuscripts of Plato and Aristotle. Among the Muslim writers regarded as men of wisdom in the Italian world were Ibn Sina (Avicenna in Latin, 980–1037), an Arab physician and philosopher of Bukhara in Central Asia; al-Razi (Rhazes), author of a medical encyclopaedia; and Ibn Rushd (Averroes in Latin, 1126–98), an Arab philosopher of Spain who tried to resolve the tension between philosophical knowledge and religious beliefs.

In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg (1400–1458), the German who made the first printing press, printed 150 copies of the Bible in his workshop. By 1500, many classical texts, nearly all in Latin, had been printed in Italy. Printed books allowed ideas, opinions, and information to move more widely and rapidly than ever before, developed the reading habit among people, and were the chief reason humanist culture spread rapidly across the Alps from the end of the fifteenth century.

Copernicus (1473–1543) asserted that the planets, including the earth, rotate around the sun, overturning the Church's earth-centric belief. A devout Christian, Copernicus was afraid of the possible reaction from traditionalist clergymen. For this reason, he did not want his manuscript De revolutionibus (The Rotation) to be printed, and only on his deathbed did he give it to his follower Joachim Rheticus.

In 1517, Martin Luther (1483–1546), a young German monk, launched a campaign against the Catholic Church, arguing that a person did not need priests to contact God and that faith alone could guide them to heaven. This movement—called the Protestant Reformation—led churches in Germany and Switzerland to break their connection with the Pope. In Switzerland, Luther's ideas were popularised by Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and later by Jean Calvin (1509–64).

The new ideal of individuality and citizenship excluded women, who were looked upon as keepers of the households and generally had no say in how their husbands ran business. However, Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558) of Venice argued that women ought to seek humanist education and was invited to give orations at the University of Padua. Isabella d'Este (1474–1539), Marchesa of Mantua, ruled her state while her husband was absent and presided over a court famed for its intellectual brilliance.

Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) was a Belgian and a professor of medicine at the University of Padua. He was the first to dissect the human body, which the text describes as the beginning of modern physiology. His work also connected art and science: artists went to medical school laboratories to study bone structures in order to paint and sculpt human figures accurately.

Recent writers like Peter Burke of England have suggested that Burckhardt exaggerated the sharp difference between this period and the one that preceded it. Many elements associated with the Renaissance in Italy can be traced back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It has also been suggested that in the ninth century in France there was a similar literary and artistic blossoming. Labelling any period the 'Dark Ages' is now seen as unfair. Moreover, Europeans learned not just from the Greeks and Romans, but from India, Arabia, Iran, Central Asia, and China—debts unacknowledged because history was written from a Europe-centred viewpoint.

Francesco Petrarch (1304–78) represented an important shift in the study of antiquity. To him, antiquity was a distinctive civilisation best understood through the actual words of the ancient Greeks and Romans. He therefore stressed the importance of a close reading of ancient authors, helping shift the focus of university learning from purely religious teaching to the study of classical texts and human culture.

More than half a century after Copernicus, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) built on his heliocentric idea. Kepler's Cosmographical Mystery demonstrated that the planets move around the sun not in circles but in ellipses. Galileo confirmed the notion of a dynamic world in his work The Motion. This scientific revolution reached its climax with Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation.

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