Question about the Renaissance in England and France

[Quixote1818]

I am in a discussion about the middle class with this fellow and below is his response to my suggesting the black death helped lead to the middle class and the Renaissance which I had heard from Thom Hartman. First of all he seems to say I am wrong then mostly agree with what I said and then bring up two instances in history I can't find anything on. What is this 5 year rebellion in France? In a google search nothing comes up. And I had always thought the Renaissance in England lasted for a long time bringing us guys like William Shakespeare. I think this guy is just pulling crap out of his ass. Here is what he wrote:


Snip> Your assumed a connection between the Bubonic Plague and the Renaissance, which isn't really accurate. True, the plague did cause prices to go up for labor and goods, and allowed some peasants to earn enough money to move towards what we'd now call middle class. However, in France, they were bloodily forced back into Manorialism in a 5 year rebellion. In England, they were taxed so heavily that they were back to broke in no time. In both cases by whom? That pesky all powerful government!

The renaissance was started in Northern Italy, largely as a result of income created by merchants and trading (GASP! Could it be capitalism?) This then attracted bankers, teachers, artisans, and other skilled workers.

[derby378]

1. Your friend is partially right

The Renaissance did start in Italy - Florence, to be exact - but it wasn't merely an infusion of capital. Tell your friend to read up on Filippo Brunelleschi and why Europe owes him serious bling for introducing everyone to linear perspective.

[kitp]

2. not money

the dispersal through europe of long-lost writings from rome and greece, re-birth, yes? greco-roman buildings, yes?
these all came for the libraries of the caliphate of cordoba. the muslims had preserved all of these writings while the europeans had lost touch with the history.
that was what brought about the renaissance

Here

[provis99]

3. he's flat wrong on the cause of the Renaissance.

He needs to put the Ayn Rand books down and read history. the Renaissance essentially started because certain thuggish families ruling city-states in Italy actually had a taste for art. Art and enlightening works had been composed all through the Dark Age and Late Medieval Age, but what was different in the Renaissance is that you finally had state (ie government) sponsorship of the arts.

So your idiot acquaintance got it exactly backwards.

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. the Black Death of the 14th century...

led to greater social mobility, but the English Renaissance didn't really happen until later (15th century or so), with the Lancastrian victory in the Wars of the Roses and the rise of the merchant classes under the Tudors. (Henry VII was born in Wales and his accession brought with it the rise of many "new men" of merchant-class and what we'd today think of as middle-class backgrounds to positions of prominence). I'm somewhat less knowledgeable about France.

[Monarda]

5. Numerous Renaissances

The first was the Carolingian renaissance, begun by Charlemagne in the 8th century. He had most of the ancient books that have come down to us copied in newly-invented italic (lower case) script and preserved in monasteries. Charlemagne was also responsible for reviving Cathedral Schools in which children could learn to read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_school
These taught the liberal arts and eventually became universities. During this period (commonly known as the Middle Ages) books and learning were the province of the clergy.

The Renaissance of the twelfth century was spurred on by the importation of books by Aristotle preserved by the Arabs, particularly his Ethics, which was a prelude to his Politics. During this period, as towns and trades flourished, there was a continuing need for lawyers and a demand for ancient texts about law. Chancellors of towns employed copyists who copied books for secular purposes. There was also revival of vernacular poetry at this time, particularly in Italy and Southern France. This was the time of the great cathedrals.

One scholar (Vossler) thinks the Renaissance began with Dante, about 1300. Dante's Inferno is modeled on Aristotle's Ethics. His teacher (Brunetto Latini) was a Chancellor of Florence. But most other scholars date the beginning of the Italian Renaissance to the Italian poet Petrarch, who belonged to the generation directly after Dante.

In !300 book hunting began in earnest. Petrarch and his circle discovered and had copies made of important books by Cicero (teacher of eloquence to lawyers) and Livy (a Roman historian). Petrarch called for a reform of Latin (then the language of learning) and Italian style. He also complained that Medieval books were hard to read and recommended a clearer handwriting (based on Carolingian) and less cluttered looking books. In contrast to the highly technical language of the Medieval philosophers, logicians, and theologians, Petrarch and his friends wanted to establish a clear way of writing that everyone could understand, on subjects that would help people live virtuously (as opposed to counting how many angels could fit on the head of a pin, say).

Petrarch was the first one to refer to the Middle Ages as a time of decline and he tried to learn Greek. And for Italy this was a time of humiliating decline. The black plague occurred c. 1347. During the whole century, the Papal Court had relocated to France. Petrarch's successors, the Italian umanisti, flourished in the 1400s -- the Italian Renaissance proper. By then the Papacy had moved back to Rome, and the Popes set out on a massive rebuilding project, taking antiquity as their model, as did other Italian cities. Even before the invention of printing many many more books were being copied and read by laymen (albeit wealthy ones) than in all the previous centuries. (Though the biggest libraries were owned by Prelates). Printing, discovered c. 1450 (?), begins on a massive scale in the 1500s. By the time the humanist movement got to Germany, France, and England, it had assumed a religious cast. English and French poets imitated Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio.

That is my highly simplified explanation of the Renaissance! Yes, trade, particularly banking (with interest) and double entry book-keeping were mightily important in stimulating the rise of the towns.

[malaise]

15. I would add the debates which followed Aquinas' inclusion

of natural law and discussions re mind and body. Humanism was an important part of the renaissance, as was 'the Crusades'.
The Arabs didn't merely preserve Aristotle's work - they translated it.

[ellisonz]

6. I'd credit the Reformation...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. The Reformation was later than what we usually think of as the Renaissance

Luther and Calvin both had their heydays in the 16th century, which is more like the tail end of the Renaissance.

[ellisonz]

8. Of course...

However, I don't think it'd be unreasonable to judge the Renaissance as a basically elitist movement toward an idealized past. The Reformation ushered in an entirely new faith that valued hard work for profit for the direct profit of one's family and an independence from the hierarchy of the Papal church. It also brought on the Catholic Counter-Reformation. You begin to see an urban core with a strengthened trades class.

"That you are patriotic will be praised by many and easily forgiven by everyone; but in my opinion it is wiser to treat men and things as though we held this world the common fatherland of all." - Erasmus

"For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver." - Martin Luther

[WildNovember]

14. How could the Protestant Reformation cause the Renaissance?

Protestant Reformation starts circa 1517 with Luther nailing his Theses to the church door.

[JCMach1]

9. And some would argue it was the poor weather in Europe that caused

People to expand their reach for trade and other affairs...

i.e. the Little Ice Age FORCED people to adapt (like it or not):

http://www.eh-resources.org/timeline/timeline_lia.html

The Renaissance had many many causes...



Here is an image the Frost Fair on the Thames...

[WildNovember]

10. I don't understand the premise of the discussion. Seems like your friend and you are

conflating the Renaissance with capitalism and the rise of a "middle class" (however you're defining that).

The Renaissance, at least in my understanding, describes a cultural phenomenon. Are you arguing about the causes of the Renaissance?


PS: Banking & merchants existed before the Renaissance. If your friend thinks banking & merchants caused the Renaissance, you might ask if banking & merchants caused the Roman empire, or vice-versa. Seems to me those things kind of "go together," as alan watts would say.

People have always traded, and "banking" of a sort is probably older than history.

The history of banking is closely related to the history of money but banking transactions probably predate the invention of money. Deposits initially consisted of grain and later other goods including cattle, agricultural implements, and eventually precious metals such as gold, in the form of easy-to-carry compressed plates. Temples and palaces were the safest places to store gold as they were constantly attended and well built. As sacred places, temples presented an extra deterrent to would-be thieves.

How does your friend define capitalism? Does trade and banking mean capitalism to him/her? I'd disagree with the basic premise.

Also, the Black Death was spread along trade networks, from China/Mongolia to the Black Sea & then to Europe. So the merchants (global merchants, in fact) obviously predated the Renaissance AND the plague.

I think you should rethink the discussion. It might be moving in the well-dug channels formed by people's presuppositions.

Anytime there's a large aggregate of population (a city) with enough people with enough leisure to think and dream, there's an explosion of art, science, philosophy, etc.

The question is what is the material basis of that leisure -- I'd look at that question in the case of Florence & the Italian city-states -- questions of where did their food come from, who provided for their defense, etc.

The Medicis were bankers to the Pope. That's one clue. Ask your friend if s/he thinks the Papacy and Catholic Church was a capitalist institution in the period under question, and what the basis of its power was.

[JVS]

11. Your friend seems to think there weren't merchants, teachers, artisans, etc.

in the middle ages. There were.

[RainDog]

12. the renaissance began in the High Middle Ages and didn't arrive across Europe

until hundreds of years later. there was no one renaissance, but the beginning of the move to a "rebirth" of knowledge began with the Arab conquest of most of Spain and grew into the Renaissance that spread to Italy.

Muslim-controlled Spain brought Greek and Arabic texts and Jews and Greeks who were translators. They also brought the knowledge of how to make paper, which VASTLY increased the spread of knowledge b/c paper is far, far easier to make than vellum.

The first books that were translated dealt with science and mathematics, 100 years before the credited Italian Renaissance. This caused an explosion of invention and research.

Papermaking and paper books came to Italy from Spain. (Also, Sicily had been conquered by Arabs earlier and had brought Arabic scientific and mathematical texts to Italy via that route.)

Rome had fallen...and fallen. Florence was wealthy because of the banking families of the region. They were wealthy from, as in the case of the Medicis, their textile industries, etc. These industries were like serf/noble feudal arrangements, and were no where near anything resembling a middle class. After the plague, tho, textile workers did riot for better conditions.

-- The middle class really did not develop in Europe until the 18th c. with the increase in professions like law - with educated professionals who went on to foment the French Revolution (which was a top down revolution, initially, and always led by an educated intelligensia.)

anyway, it wasn't a merchant class that fueled the Renaissance. It was a wealthy group who put their money into art and other forms of culture as a way to attest to their status as wealthy power brokers. These wealthy few paid the artists and scholars. They encouraged the translation of texts in politics, literature, etc. from libraries across Europe as the idea gained traction that those in these older works were part of the culture of people in the region - works from Livy, etc. And the Greeks.

And, yes, the plagues did cut the population and make it possible to bargain for more money for labor - but they were still peasants, not a middle class.

So, I'd say your friend has it sort of backwards in that the bankers were the ones who brought in the artists and scholars and they also owned large industries. The wealth did not trickle down unless there was something like a riot and a plague to make it likely such a scenario could succeed.

In addition to bringing the beginning of "enlightenment" to western Europe, 12th c. Andalusian Spain also produced philosophers who posed questions or presented views of humans that were debated into the 19th c. (tabula rasa, etc.)

So, the money came from the wealthy and funded those who truly mattered to the creation of a renaissance - the thinkers and inventors and translators and philosophers.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. What I recall about the plague is that it not only made labor more expensive

but killed the wealthy as much as the poor, so that in some areas, the whole lord-serf relationship broke down because the feudal lords and their families had died.

That didn't happen everywhere, of course, but it did happen in some cases.

Another effect of the plague was to make people question everything they had believed and known, much as the trench warfare of World War I shocked people and prompted widespread questioning of old assumptions.

[CTyankee]

17. You have not mentioned the guilds. They commissioned plenty of art in the Renaissance

in Florence when it was a republic. The Medici family pretended to be strong "republicans" but eventually amassed power and wealth to the extent that the republic, whose original idea was to replace the feudal system in other areas of what is now Italy, was eventually destroyed.

In Siena there is an interesting fresco from the 14th century by Lorenzetti entitled "The Effects of Good Government." This fresco graphically explains what good government means to the "ordinary" people: the ability to pursue their own professions, to trade, to work the land outside the city, to enjoy the good things in life. Conspicuously missing from this depiction are churches. Hmm...

This fresco is in a building interestingly named "Palazzo Publico." It sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?

[RainDog]

18. I'm not really an expert on any of this

I just tossed in my perspective from the history of the book - because, in my, admittedly, prejudiced view, tho I don't think it's so off base, either, the history of the book is the history of intellectual progress until the invention of the Stanhope press and wood pulp paper in the Victorian era.

With that moment, I think we enter into the realm of the creation of a mass popular culture.

My knowledge of guilds is mostly centered on the end of the hand-written book and the final flourish of books of hours, psalters, etc. from the Ghent-Bruges school.

I don't know if you've even seen any of those "painted" books - but they are stunning. To "compete for attention" from illustrations from the printing press, they did all sort of trompe-l'œil botanical illustrations... just stunning work.

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/flemish/flemish.html

[CTyankee]

20. I have just begun studying Flemish art. These illuminated books are fabulous.

My area of concentration has been on the early Renaissance in Florence. There is a relatively new book on the Medici called "Medici Money," a fascinating insight into that dynasty. It is one of 15 or so that I read in my studies. I was particularly intrigued with how the fiorentini were so dedicated to their republic and keeping the power at least somewhat decentralized in a few hands by severely limiting terms of service of their city "council" and drawing by lot for each one. Also interesting is that Florence lost its republic in the 16th century. Venice's lasted a good deal longer. Go figure.

I am planning to visit Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp and Bruges this year. Thanks for the references that I see in your attachment...they will be most helpful to me in my new area of study!

[WildNovember]

13. I wonder if this isn't the "five-year rebellion" your co-discussant is referring to?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant_revolt_in_Flanders_1323%E2%80%931328

It's the only 5-year peasant rebellion I could find in france, but it preceded the plague in france (~1340)

There's this, but it wasn't 5 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie

Maybe you should ask him what he's talking about...I think he's bullshitting...about stuff he vaguely remembers...from some class or book...

[WinkyDink]

19. There are actual books about these subjects.