Link to Chronology
I've been in dental hell, though without actually being able to schedule an appointment with a dentist. I'm also very close to being caught up with my reading, so while there's some good stuff coming up, I will run out of material again soon. My plan is to publish every few days, or a couple times a week.
Antiquity rediscovered
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Nine
The Renaissance and the Reformation
Chapter I
The Transformation of Social Life From the Middle of the Fifteenth Century
1. Italy and Italian Influence
p505 ...Just as Florence took precedence of all the cities of the Middle Ages, so the Italian Renaissance manifested a variety and originality and vigor unknown elsewhere, and to which it owed its astonishing influence.
The fact is that the traditional authorities which dominated both social and intellectual life declined or disappeared far earlier in Italy than in the rest of Europe. And this was largely a consequence of the the extraordinary development of urban life. Just at first the nobles inhabiting the cities were involved in incessant conflicts with the bourgeoisie, but gradually, insensibly, they began to engage in commerce, so that the very clear line of demarcation which elsewhere divided the noble from the non-noble was slowly effaced, the descendants of knights and the offspring of enriched merchants intermingling in a community of manners and interests, independently of birth. The social status became more important than the juridical status; moreover, in the course of the 14th century the Italian nobility abandoned the profession of arms, thereby losing the raison d etre of its constitution as a distinct and privileged class. War became a profession that was left to specialists, the condottieri, men of the most various origins, the majority being successful parvenus; men in whom there was no trace of the old feudal loyalty... The progress of economic organization, the development of commercial society, and the improvement of instruments of credit had the consequence, from the very first, of requiring in the banker or the man of affairs an intellectual ability and culture which were not found in the same degree among the merchants of the North... While giving due attention to his business, he allowed himself some hours of leisure, so that he was able to distract himself by intellectual interests, embellish his house with works of art, and acquire a refinement which made him singularly unlike the "patricians" of Germany, Flanders or France. And so, recruited at once from the nobility and the bourgeoisie, a sort of mundane aristocracy came into existence, comprising all those who lived the same kind of life, enjoyed the same degree of education, had the same tastes, and indulged in the same pleasures; and this kind of aristocracy had not its like in any other country. [I am reminded of Charles Swann. Swann's Way was published just before the Great War.] The old society was disintegrating. New groups were in process of formation, no longer determined by convention and prejudice, but coming into existence freely, by virtue of affinities; and in these groups one may say that the spirit of class was replaced by the spirit of humanity.
The development of capitalism involved still further consequences. [Footnote: "Here I should need my books and my notes before I could say anything definite." I think this is the first time he has passed on a subject like this. Maybe he hadn't lectured on the subject as yet?] We should note... the effective principality of the Medici in Florence, which had no other origin than their wealth.
...Florence is the only European city that could be compared with Athens; and like Athens, Florence was in every sense of the word a State which had to deal with as many foreign as domestic problems. It is not surprising that the first political theorists worthy of the name, Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Guiccardini (1483-1540), should have been born upon this fertile soil... They were as independent of theological conceptions as of the juridical constructions which had hitherto influenced political ideas. Urban life was overflowing the narrow frontiers of the Middle Ages and becoming civic life.
p507 ...Never having been squeezed into a single State, Italy was then able to become, in respect of the rest of Europe, something of what ancient Greece was for Rome. If the policy of Frederick II had succeeded in unifying Italy, Florence would have been impossible.
p508 The overthrow of social and political traditions was accompanied by the decadence of manners and morals... the morality of the Middle Ages... regarded the secular life as something secondary and inferior... in accordance with the strict theological precept, all commercial profit, all successful speculation, all bargaining was to be condemned as proceeding from the sin of avarice... One must read compilations like those of Caesar von Heisterbach (1180-1240) or Thomas de Cantimpre (1201-1263) to obtain an exact idea of the mentality of the 13th century with regard to commerce. It could hardly imagine the merchant's strongbox without picturing the devil squatting on the lid...
p510 While the Renaissance had liberated itself from the ascetic morality of the Middle Ages, it did not replace it by any other morality. The strongest and noblest souls imposed upon themselves an ideal of virtue and honor; for others glory was the dominant motive; but the majority seem to have obeyed no other rules than those of personal interest, or they allowed themselves to be led by their tastes and their passions. The loosening of the conjugal tie, and the frequency of assassinations, poisonings, and crimes of every kind and in every class of society, are incontestable evidence of a moral crisis. [Doesn't this contradict the picture he's painted for us of the behavior of the rival princes?] And yet, in the midst of this disorder, we see the beginnings of a sense of individual liberty, of human dignity, of the beauty of energy, and of the responsibility of the private man before his own conscience. Shall we go too far if we credit the Renaissance with having realized... that morality should not consist of a mere code of precepts, and that it cannot be complete without the free adhesion of the personality? This, no doubt, is an aristocratic conception; in the sense, at least, that it is given to few to attain to it. But was not the whole achievement of the Renaissance aristocratic? Was it not characterized above all by the formation of an intellectual elite? ... And was it not to this intellectual elite that it owed its most striking feature, which -- above all in Italy -- gave it its final and proper physiognomy -- the return to antiquity?
p511 ... If the literature of antiquity had had the power of provoking... ["The change in the ideas, the manners and the morals of the 15th century"] the Renaissance would have occurred as early as the reign of Charlemagne... between the Aeneid and the "Divine Comedy" there is a gulf. Dante did not understand Virgil, and could not have understood him; he was too profound, too exalted a Christian and a mystic. What the Middle Ages was able to feel and appreciate in the thought of antiquity was neither the form nor the spirit, but a few sentences, a few anecdotes, a few "moralities," understood in a symbolic sense. The unknown masters who built the Romantic and Gothic Cathedrals had before their eyes a great number of ancient monuments, and they lived in their midst without seeing them... Their incomprehension of classic art is comparable only to the incomprehension of the art of the Middle Ages itself after the triumph of the Renaissance... Without a preliminary orientation of thought and feeling, neither the Renaissance, at the close of the 14th century, nor Romanticism, as the beginning of the 19th century, would have found so many and such fervent adepts...
This is an interesting variation on the argument in In Search of Lost Time and in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that the artist must train an audience to see art in a new way.
p512 ...At the very moment when the Church was ceasing to satisfy the needs of the intellect, it happened... that an incomparable art and literature became available, which did satisfy them. Men deserted the cathedral to find themselves before the open doors of the temple of antiquity...
p513 ... the Italian humanism of the 15th century... made... classic Latin, correct and elegant -- the international language of all educated people, down to our own day. It thus created, for the benefit of laymen, a uniform [aristocratic] culture, externally very like that of which the clergy had hitherto retained the monopoly. In so doing it completed the constitution of that intellectual aristocracy which social evolution had created in the heart of the nation... [I could remove my "aristocratic" insertion, but I love that I anticipated where Pirenne was heading.] Writers whose taste was formed by the study of the classics transferred to their national languages the idea of beauty which they discovered in the classics... Men assimilated the forms and the ideas of antiquity, but did not allow themselves to be dominated by them. Their minds were sufficiently enfranchised to retain their independence...
He's thinking about art here, but when it comes to political ideas I'm not so sure about this. To what extent were the ideas that shaped the American Constitution (think slavery) influenced by the example of Athens and Rome? For that matter, the European adoption of the African slave trade occurred under the watch of the Renaissance.
p514 A universal curiosity was abroad. Hardly anything was known of the philosophy of the ancients, apart from Aristotle, and he was discredited by the portrait which the Scholastics had drawn of him. Platonism was therefore welcomed with all the greater enthusiasm. The Greek literature which the Byzantine refugees had revealed to Italy, even before the Turkish capture of Constantinople, opened up new intellectual horizons. Already a few pioneers dreamed of going even further, and ventured into the domain of Hebraic studies and Oriental philology. Lastly, the exact sciences began their glorious careers. Physics, astronomy and mathematics flourished in that springtime of modern thought which gave the Italy of the 15th century its incomparable charm. It must not be forgotten that Copernicus studied at Padua and Bologna, and the scientific labors of Toscanelli and Luca Paccioli contributed largely to the discovery of the New World.
Pirenne wouldn't have known that the Basques had been fishing in the New World for centuries. Though he might have, if he had read carefully the accounts of the later "Discoverers". It doesn't actually require that much science to cross an ocean or navigate around a continent. What it does require, and this is something Pirenne should have been on top of, is the commercial interest to do the thing.
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