Changing Cultural Traditions

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XI (Themes in World History), Chapter 5.

Nobody in 1400 said "we are living in the Renaissance"

The word "Renaissance" means rebirth, but the people who painted, wrote and argued in fourteenth century Italy never called their age by that name. The label was popularised in the nineteenth century by a Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt. This chapter follows the cultural changes in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century: how towns grew, how people began to ask new questions about humans, God and nature, and how one invention, printing, carried those questions across the continent.

Why Italy first: cities, trade and universities

From the fourteenth century towns grew across Europe and a distinct urban culture developed. Townspeople thought themselves more civilised than country folk. Florence, Venice and Rome became centres of art and learning. Printing made books and prints available to distant readers, and Europeans developed a sense of history, contrasting their "modern" world with the "ancient" Greco-Roman one.

After the fall of the western Roman Empire, Italy was divided and had no single government. The Pope in Rome was sovereign but politically weak. Meanwhile western Europe was organised by feudal ties under the Latin Church, eastern Europe was part of the Byzantine Empire, and Islamic states lay across the Mediterranean. In that gap Italian ports revived: Byzantine and Islamic trade expanded, the Mongols opened the Silk Route, and western European commerce grew. Cities such as Florence and Venice became republics, and other cities became courts ruled by princes.

Venice and Genoa were special. The clergy were not politically dominant, and there were no powerful feudal lords. Rich merchants and bankers took part in government, and this helped the idea of citizenship take root.

The earliest European universities were Italian. Padua and Bologna were centres of legal study from the eleventh century, and commercial life created a demand for lawyers and notaries.

Humanism

Francesco Petrarch (born 1304) saw antiquity as a distinct civilisation to be understood through the actual words of ancient Greeks and Romans. He stressed close reading of ancient authors. By the early fifteenth century, "humanist" described teachers of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. These subjects did not come from religion, and they trained individual skills through discussion and debate. The Latin word humanitas, used by Cicero (106 to 43 BCE) for culture, is the root of "humanities".

Florence rose through Dante Alighieri (1265 to 1321) and the painter Giotto (1267 to 1337), whose lifelike figures broke with the stiff earlier style. A Renaissance Man was a person of many parts, combining scholar, diplomat, theologian and artist.

Humanists believed a "dark age" had followed the fall of Rome, and they called the period from the fifteenth century "modern".

Arab bridge: how Greek learning travelled

Arab translators preserved Greek works. Plato became Aflatun and Aristotle Aristu in Arabic, and Ptolemy's Almagest carries the Arabic article "al". Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980 to 1037), al-Razi (Rhazes) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126 to 1198) were honoured by Italians as men of wisdom.

Transmission in one line: Greek texts → translated into Arabic → carried to Spain and Sicily → translated into Latin → read in Italian universities and by humanists.

Artists, realism and buildings

In 1416 Donatello (1386 to 1466) made lifelike statues. Andreas Vesalius (1514 to 1564), a Belgian professor of medicine at Padua, dissected the human body, which began modern physiology. Painters used geometry to create perspective, studied changing light for a three dimensional effect and used oil paint. Chinese and Persian artistic influence reached them through the Mongols. These changes produced realism, which lasted until the nineteenth century.

From 1417 the popes were politically stronger, ruins in Rome were excavated, and a classical architectural style revived the Roman imperial manner. Michelangelo (1475 to 1564) painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, sculpted the Pieta and designed the dome of St Peter's. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 to 1446) designed the dome of the cathedral of Florence, the Duomo.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Vesalius is remembered as the first to dissect the human body and the founder of modern anatomy. In reality: human dissection was already practised in some Italian universities around 1300. Vesalius's lasting contribution, in his 1543 book on anatomy, was to correct the ancient authority Galen by direct observation. Why it matters: the exam asks "who began" and the history asks "who changed the method". Know both.

Printing: how ideas went viral

Europeans owed printing to the Chinese, whose methods they met through the courts of the Mongol rulers, along with firearms, the compass and the abacus. In 1455 Johannes Gutenberg printed 150 copies of the Bible, in the time a monk would have needed to write out one. The mastery of printing was the greatest revolution of the sixteenth century. Before printing, intellectual movements had stayed regional, because texts moved slowly. After it, printed books carried humanist culture across the Alps from the late fifteenth century.

A new idea of the human being

Humanists argued that human beings could shape their own lives. Francesco Barbaro (1390 to 1454) of Venice defended the pursuit of wealth as a virtue. Lorenzo Valla (1406 to 1457), in On Pleasure, criticised the Christian ban on pleasure. Niccolo Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), argued that human beings are driven above all by self interest, so rulers should plan on that basis.

This new picture of the individual and the citizen left women out. Dowries went into family businesses, but women had no say. A few exceptions stand out: Cassandra Fedele of Venice (1465 to 1558) was skilled in Greek and Latin and lectured at Padua, and Isabella d'Este (1474 to 1539), Marchesa of Mantua, ruled in her husband's absence.

Debates within Christianity

In northern Europe humanism attracted churchmen. Thomas More (1478 to 1535) in England and Erasmus (1466 to 1536) in Holland criticised the Church for greed and for selling indulgences, documents that apparently freed a buyer from the burden of sins. Humanists also exposed the Donation of Constantine, which claimed Emperor Constantine had given the clergy judicial and tax powers, as a forgery.

In 1517 Martin Luther (1483 to 1546) began a campaign against the Catholic Church, arguing that no priest was needed to reach God. This is the Protestant Reformation. Ulrich Zwingli (1484 to 1531) and Jean Calvin (1509 to 1564) spread the cause in Switzerland. The Anabaptists linked salvation with an end to social oppression. William Tyndale (1494 to 1536) translated the New Testament into English. When German peasants rebelled in 1525, Luther backed the rulers who put the rebellion down. Ignatius Loyola, a Spaniard, founded the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in 1540, to combat Protestantism, serve the poor and widen knowledge of other cultures.

Pause and predict: Luther urged people to read scripture without priests. Which earlier invention made that demand realistic?

Check your answer: printing. Once Bibles and pamphlets were cheap and in the language people spoke, ordinary people could read for themselves, and Luther's ideas spread far faster than any earlier reformer's.

The Copernican revolution

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 to 1543), a contemporary of Luther, argued that the planets, including the earth, move round the sun. He feared how traditional clergy would react and would not print his book, De revolutionibus, in his lifetime, giving it to his follower Joachim Rheticus on his deathbed. Johannes Kepler (1571 to 1630) showed that planets move in ellipses. Galileo Galilei (1564 to 1642) confirmed the Copernican picture of a world in motion, and Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation completed the revolution (Principia Mathematica, 1687).

The Royal Society of London (1662) and the Paris Academy held public lectures and experiments, creating a new scientific culture in the public domain.

Two views. For the exam: Copernicus kept his work from print because he feared the clergy. Another reading: historians note that Copernicus also had churchmen among his supporters, and that his book appeared in 1543 with a dedication to Pope Paul III. They see his delay as partly a wish to perfect the mathematics and avoid ridicule, so the fear of the Church is not the whole story.

Was there a European "Renaissance"?

Two views. For the exam: Burckhardt argued that a new humanist culture made the human being a self determining individual and marked a clear break from the medieval period. Another reading: Peter Burke and others argue that Burckhardt exaggerated the break. Earlier scholars already knew Greek and Roman culture, religion stayed central, and many features of the "Renaissance" can be traced to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an earlier flowering in ninth century France.

Pause and predict: Greek works reached Italy through Arabic translations, and Chinese and Persian art influenced Italian painters through the Mongols. Is "rebirth of Greece and Rome" the whole story?

Check your answer: no. Europe's cultural change owed debts not only to Greece and Rome but also to India, Arabia, Iran, Central Asia and China. These debts went unrecognised because history was written from a Europe-centred viewpoint.

Over these centuries a gap also began to open between private and public life, and Europe started to divide into states united by common languages.

Timeline

People

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: The Three Orders explains the feudal Europe and town revival from which these cultural changes grew.
• Next: Displacing Indigenous Peoples follows Europeans across the Atlantic, using the voyages that grew from this curiosity about the world.
• Class XII link: Bhakti and Sufi Traditions offers a comparison: religious movements in India that, like the Reformation, questioned ritual and priestly authority and used local languages.