Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.
So, when we left off last time, the Renaissance was a very big deal, provided you were part
of the elite in approximately this part of the world.
Today, we’re going to follow the spread of the Renaissance to France, England, Spain,
the Low Countries, the seventy two bajillion ministates of central Europe.
Also, suddenly there are a lot more books to read.
INTRO The Renaissance was shaped and promoted by
the discovery in the mid-15th century of moveable type printing.
The credit goes mostly to the German goldsmith and tinkerer Johannes Gutenberg, whose printing
press from the 1440s produced the famous Gutenberg Bible and fueled the spread of printed books.
Now, printing techniques, including movable type, had been used in China for many centuries,
but printing could be quicker in Europe because the Latin alphabet only contained twenty-six
characters, and also innovations made the letters easy to eject and reset to form new
words, pamphlets, and newsletters, and then entire books.
In fact, there are books in the Center of the World today!
It’s my favorite center of the world yet!
I love books.
It’s really hard to exaggerate just how big a deal printing was.
Like, before our friend Gutenberg, most books in Europe were copied from other books by
hand.
This was time-consuming and expensive, and it introduced errors.
And it also meant that books were not part of most people’s lives.
Like, if you were among the around 80% of people in England and France who worked in
agriculture at the time, it’s not just that you didn’t need to learn to read to do your
job; there was generally nothing you could read.
But printing changed all of that incredibly quickly.
The first printing press arrived in Venice in 1469.
By 1500, there were 417 printing presses in the city.
In the first fifty years after printing came to Europe, over 20 million volumes of books
were printed.
This included the great works from the classical world that the Renaissance was rediscovering,
but also many legal works.
And as jurists worked to decipher the meaning of every Latin word of the corpus of Roman
law, the western legal tradition was born.
More copies of the Bible were available to read, and argue about.
And new stories and poems could be shared more widely.
Think of it this way: Whether you were interested in science or literature or law or mathematics,
printing meant that more people had the opportunity to encounter far more voices from across time
and space.
And as Renaissance ideas spread north fueled in part by printing, it followed that writers
and scholars would see the ideas of humanism through the lens of local concerns.
Also, of course, northern European thinkers downplayed the movement’s Italian origins.
One of the great rules of history is that whenever Italy has an idea, northern Europe
will be like, “Yeah, no.
We totally already had that idea like eight times.
Our version is so much different and better.
Wait till you see how we do the black death slash ballet slash fascism slash automatic
weapons slash pizza slash defensive-minded football.”
Anyway, Pieter Brueghel’s “Dutch Proverbs” is one example of how different northern Renaissance
art was from its Italian counterparts--Breughel is still interested in the ideas of humanism
in this painting--it’s secular, focused on people, set in the natural world--but you
can see that Breughel’s painting of scruffy rural villagers acting out ridiculous common
wisdom has none of the lyricism or elegance of, say, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
Then again, in many respects, the Northern renaissance wasn’t so unique--the touchstone
was still the classical world and its art and writing.
Florentines had made much of the Roman legal tradition that empowered the paterfamilias,
or the male head of the family, and this was very much embraced in the north as well.
The idea was that all social and political order stemmed from the exercise of the father’s
authority over the family unit.
From the father’s secure position, the well-being of the family flowed.
And more than that, the well-being of the larger state depended on the good order of
all the families it encompassed, just as the successes of Rome had rested on familial underpinnings.
And if humanism was opening the door to rethinking current values, some sort of anchor was need
to prevent chaos, and people to the north and south agreed that security was going to
rest in the classic tradition of the father’s legal dominance.
In both North and South, humanism also went radical.
Some humanists began regularly teaching—not just discussing—its principles and its main
subject matter: rhetoric, which may not seem like a big deal to you, but it means that
at least in the radical fringe of the Renaissance world, ancient Latin and Greek were being
taught, not just the medieval versions of those languages--which would eventually contribute
to a rethinking of what certain texts actually said, perhaps most notably The Bible.
Also, girls sometimes joined their brothers in being tutored, a radical idea indeed, although
one that could also trace itself back to the Old Light--in justifying the education of
girls, scholars cited ancient women who’d received tutoring, including Sappho, Aspasia,
and Cornelia, the daughter of the Roman general Scipio.
And as humanism grew, so did the number of universities.
European universities had long taught a system of theology and philosophy known as “scholasticism”
that focused on early church teaching and Aristotelian logic, but now they began to
embrace humanism, spending less time studying religious texts and more time investigating
the human condition and thinking about how to organize human societies, including how
to establish and enforce laws.
And amid these developments, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, also known as the “Prince
of the Humanists,” became the commanding figure in the Northern Renaissance.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
Erasmus contributed to taking humanism along its twisted path from ideas of the study of
“humans” and the “active life” into politics.
In 1595, he went to study at the University of Paris and began publishing his opinions
on public affairs, including the responsibilities of a ruler.
A prince, he declared in the Education of a Christian Prince, needed to study the classics
and the deeds of worthy ancient leaders.
And in these examples he would discover the means by which great leaders achieved the
public good and keep the peace even in troubled times.
he also emphasized the importance of reading the Bible and the leading Christian authors.
It was for this that he came to be known as advocating for a “middle road” between
the pagan ancients and the more recent Christian thinkers.
But he was also at times very critical of the Catholic Church.
Erasmus was also a central figure in the rising “Republic of Letters,” a growing international
community of humanists in Europe.
In fact, he corresponded with some five hundred people around Europe, including everyone from
Sir Thomas More to Martin Luther to Pope Leo X.
Aside from his work on Biblical translations, he also edited, translated, and published
ancient pagan texts, like Cicero’s, and the works of many pivotal religious authors,
especially Saint Jerome.
He was astonishingly prolific, hiring editors, proofreaders, and even ghostwriters to help
him produce mountains of humanistic texts and fashion himself as the quintessential
figure of the Northern Renaissance before dying suddenly of dysentery at the age of
69 because, you know, it was the sixteenth century.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
Before he died, Erasmus saw the rise of the Protestant reformation.
He disagreed with much of Luther’s teachings, and remained loyal to the Catholic Church,
but Erasmus’s emphasis on inner spirituality over ritual did in some ways presage Protestantism.
Some felt that “Erasmus had laid the egg, and Luther had hatched it,”
but Erasmus dismissed that, saying that “Luther hatched a different bird entirely.”
Also, for the record neither Erasmus nor Martin Luther could lay eggs, because they were mammals.
But now we’re into biology, and getting a bit ahead of ourselves with the Reformation.
Before we start debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, we should acknowledge
the other great Renaissance thinker who shaped what we now call political science--Niccolo
Machiavelli, who was like the Erasmus living in the Upside Down.
Machiavelli had been a faithful supporter of Florence’s republican traditions.
After the death of Lorenzo Medici in 1492, Machiavelli served the republic in several
positions.
But after Spanish, papal, and other forces defeated the republic in 1512, Machiavelli
was imprisoned and tortured (he was hung by his wrists until his shoulders were dislocated).
He was eventually released after three weeks in prison and then set out to write his masterwork
The Prince, which was only published in 1532, five years after his death.
The Prince was very different from the work of other humanists, especially from the political
ideals of Christian humanism found in Erasmus’s essays and letters.
Machiavelli imagined a grounding in the classics for an aspiring leader of his day, but he
believed the attitudes necessary for leaders were vastly different from what the ancients
had counseled.
His most quoted advice focused on whether a ruler should aim to be loved or feared:
“One should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person,
it is much safer to be feared than loved.”
Machiavelli took a so-called realist views of politics--he focused on how a prince could
retain power, and maintain order.
And he was much more interested in what was effective than what was, like, noble.
And unlike many humanists’ focus on maintaining peace, Machiavelli believed war was necessary--in
fact, he wrote a book about it, called Art of War.
He argued that rulers needed to prepare for war by studying great military leaders of
the past, and he believed that effective military leadership was vital to effective political
leadership, because those who win wars get to gain peace on their terms.
But there were also idealists among Renaissance humanists, like the Englishman Thomas More,
who was one of Erasmus’s five billion friends.
And a close one in fact.
More wrote the classic book Utopia, which imagines a society without private property,
where reason and cooperation have replaced struggles for glory and power.
It’s an odd book--More was a devout Catholic, and in fact would eventually be executed for
opposing King Henry VIII’s turn toward Protestantism, and yet the seemingly enlightened Utopia is
very much not Catholic.
Like, the Utopians have married priests, for instance, and also they can get divorced.
But regardless, More believed that humanistic analysis could lead to widespread peace and
prosperity--which by the way I would argue turned out to be sort of correct, even though
A. it would take a while for humanism’s benefits to be felt, and B. More did not get
to enjoy them, on account of being separated from his head in 1535.
A century before More’s Utopia, another book that imagined an ideal citystate, Book
of the City of Ladies, was written by Christine de Pizan.
De Pizan was born in Venice but moved to France as a kid when her dad got a job as the French
king’s astrologer.
As you do.
She married and had three children, but then her husband died of the plague, and thereafter
she earned her living writing.
In Book of the City of Ladies, de Pizan gathered up all the great and good women of history
and placed them in a city where the Virgin Mary is queen.
The book argues that women can be virtuous leaders, and rational beings, and that leadership
by virtuous women could beget virtuous communities--a stark contrast to Machiavelli’s worldview.
So at this point, it’s common at this point to ask students to think about the relative
merits of idealism and realism--is a prince or princess, or for that matter a student
at a high school, better off being loved or feared?
Is it more important for a community to be fair or stable?
Should leaders prioritize virtue or effectiveness?
These are big, interesting questions, and I think they’re worth considering.
But I’d also ask you to look at the lens through which you’re approaching those questions.
Machiavelli’s life was marked by endless wars and shifting alliances.
He saw many short-lived governments fail to achieve stability.
Christine de Pizan saw the intense oppression of women and the dismissal of their talents
and intellect.
Erasmus didn’t exactly have an easy life--he was born out of wedlock and both his parents
died of plague when he was a teenager--but he saw a very different world in northern
Europe than Machiavelli saw in Italy, or than Christine de Pizan saw.
Where do you sit in the world, and how might that shape what kind of community you wish
to see?
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.