History · Ch 5 — Changing Cultural Traditions
Was there a European ‘Renaissance’ in the Fourteenth Century?
Was there a European ‘Renaissance’ in the Fourteenth Century?
The Question of a Fourteenth-Century Renaissance
The term ‘Renaissance’ carries a heavy assumption: that this period marked a sharp break with the past, a rebirth of Greek and Roman ideas after centuries of darkness. But was the twelfth and thirteenth century really a time of gloom and stagnation? Modern historians, notably Peter Burke of England, have argued that the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt overstated the contrast. Burckhardt’s use of the word ‘Renaissance’ implied two things: that Greek and Roman civilisation was reborn in this period, and that scholars and artists replaced the Christian worldview with a pre-Christian one. Burke suggests both claims were exaggerated.
Why? Because scholars in earlier centuries were already familiar with Greek and Roman culture. The classical texts had never been entirely lost. And religion remained deeply important to people’s lives throughout the Renaissance — it did not vanish or get ‘substituted’. To paint the Renaissance as a time of dynamism and artistic creativity, and the Middle Ages as a time of gloom and lack of development, is an over-simplification. Many features we associate with the Italian Renaissance can actually be traced back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some historians have even pointed to a similar literary and artistic blossoming in ninth-century France.
The sharp ‘Renaissance vs Dark Ages’ divide is a myth. The earlier period was not a void, and the later period was not a clean break. Both arguments — that classical civilisation was reborn, and that Christianity was replaced — are exaggerations.
Beyond Greece and Rome: The Wider World
The cultural changes in Europe were not shaped only by the classical civilisation of Rome and Greece. It is true that the archaeological and literary recovery of Roman culture created great admiration for that civilisation. But Europe’s transformation drew on far more than the classical past.
By this time, technologies and skills in Asia had moved well ahead of what the Greeks and Romans had known. The world had become more connected. New techniques of navigation allowed people to sail much further than had ever been possible before. The expansion of Islam and the Mongol conquests linked Asia and North Africa with Europe — not politically, but through trade and the exchange of learning and skills.
So the Europeans learned not just from the Greeks and Romans, but from India, Arabia, Iran, Central Asia, and China. These debts went unacknowledged for a long time, because when historians first wrote the history of this period, they saw it from a Europe-centred viewpoint. The story was told as if Europe had invented everything itself, when in fact it had borrowed heavily from the East.
The Renaissance was not a purely European, purely classical revival. It was fed by knowledge and skills from India, Arabia, Iran, Central Asia, and China — debts that European-centred history long ignored.
The Separation of Private and Public Life
One genuine and important change did occur in this period: the gradual separation of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres of life. The public sphere meant the area of government and formal religion. The private sphere included the family and personal religion.
This changed how the individual was understood. A person now had a private as well as a public role. He was not simply a member of one of the ‘three orders’ — the clergy, the nobility, and the peasantry — into which medieval society was conventionally divided. He was also a person in his own right. An artist, for instance, was not just a member of a guild; he was known for himself, as an individual with a distinct identity and reputation.
This sense of the individual would later find political expression. In the eighteenth century, it took the form of the belief that all individuals had equal political rights. …