The Renaissance Myth

The Renaissance Myth

James Franklin

THE HISTORY OF IDEAS is full of more tall stories than most other departments of history. Here are three which manage to combine initial implausibility with impregnability to refutation: that in the Middle Ages it was believed that the world was flat; that medieval philosophers debated as to how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; that Galileo revolutionised physics by dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. None of these stories is true, and no competent historian has asserted any of them, but none shows any sign of disappearing from the public consciousness.

The first of these is easily refuted. The best known work of medieval thought, both in its own time and now, is Thomas Aquinas'Summa Theologica. Inbook 1, question 1, article 1of this treatise, the roundness of the earth is given as a standard example of a well-known scientific truth. The libel about angels on the heads of pins seems to be of comparatively recent invention. I have not been able to find it in any author before Erasmus Darwin (who was late enough to have written, in his Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, on the prospects for the spread of civilisation to New South Wales), though one might suspect the Encyclopedists or Rabelais as more likely originators of the idea.[Update]No medieval writer has been exhibited who engaged in such a dispute, for the good reason that there was none. The Galileo story has a little more foundation, in that it was asserted within fifty years of Galileo's death by someone who had been alive in his time. But investigation has failed to turn up any good evidence that Galileo really did conduct such an experiment, either in Pisa or elsewhere.

I do not expect that denying these stories will have any effect on their spread. It hasn't in the past. The only threat to their immortality seems to lie in their possible displacement by an inconsistent and more bizarre story. The one about the earth being thought flat, for example, is really not very interesting. There is a chance that, in this country(Australia)at least, it will be replaced by the story that St Augustine believed the southern hemisphere must be uninhabited, since people living there would be unable to see the Second Coming over Jerusalem.

Granted that one of the purposes of history is to supply us with picturesque and instructive anecdotes, it must be insisted that this requirement cannot override the obligation on writers of history to keep to the truth. On the contrary, tales of the perfidy of fortune or the folly of princes are instructive precisely to the extent that they are true. In most branches of history, counsels of good sense along these lines have prevailed, and the public expects of its historians a certain complexity in their explanations and reasonably high standards of evidence. It is no longer possible to ascribe the course of events simply to the ambitions of great men or to class hatred, nor can anyone just repeat a story using as sole evidence the assertion of some previous historian. The examples above, though, make one wonder whether these laudable developments have taken place in the history of ideas, at least of the more popular kind. The subject is still a morass of colourful falsehoods and sectarian myths handed down from generation to generation with no more foundation in evidence than those genealogies whereby royal houses once sought to connect themselves with the heroes of Troy. And here I do not use "myth" in any technical sense, as someavant gardetheologians are said to do, according to which a myth may be in some way essentially true. By "myth" I mean "lie".

The tales about the medieval thinkers and Galileo are little lies. The big lie of which they are the foothills is the Renaissance.

The main elements of the Renaissance myth are familiar enough: the sudden dawning of a new outlook on the world after a thousand years of darkness, the rediscovery of ancient learning, the spread of new ideas of intellectual inquiry and freedom, investigation of the real world replacing the sterile disputes of the scholastics, the widening of the world through the discovery of America and the advance of science, the reform of religion. Apart from a few quibbles about the supposed suddenness of the change, and that more on the grounds of a general belief in the gradualness of historical change than because of any evidence, this paradigm seems to be as firmly in place now as it ever was.

In fact there is no truth in any of this. On the contrary, as we will see, the "Renaissance" was a period when thought declined significantly, bring ing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages.

Any attempt to pin down what happened in the Renaissance is soon going to run into definitional problems, concerning what is to count as in the period. Platitudes on the impossibility of defining a period of history exactly, and the public's inability to remember any date before 1492, have permitted the Renaissance to undergo some alarming changes of scale, like King Kong in the film. A reasonably popular consensus would start it roughly with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, allowing the Middle Ages to finish on a suitably final note, and end about 1564. In that year, by a convenient coincidence, Michelangelo and Calvin died and Shakespeare, Marlowe and Galileo were born. This gives a Renaissance of a hundred years or so, which seems quite long enough for a burst of creative energy. It puts the dispersal of Byzantine scholars and the voyages to America and India early in the period, to act as causal factors in the spread of new ideas. It fits in all the people we would definitely want to see as Renaissance figures - Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo de Medici, Botticelli, Rabelais, Erasmus, More, the Borgias, Machiavelli and Luther. But the problem for an admirer of the period is that it can produce only one intellectual achievement of any significance at all - Copernicus' theory of the planets, published near the end of the period in 1543. This embarrassment has been solved by letting the edges of the Renaissance, on the pretext that these cannot be precisely defined, tacitly drift out to include Dante and Giotto at one end and Galileo at the other. That gives a bloated Renaissance of three hundred years, and includes the Black Death, the entire Hundred Years War and other things calculated to tarnish a golden age. But there is a compelling motive for wanting to make this move, namely that in Italy, the centre of the Renaissance, there were no thinkers worthy of the name between the two extremes.

In order to compare the Renaissance with something (unfavourably, as it will turn out), let us recall something about the state of the world around 1300, the time of Dante and Giotto. There could hardly be a more medieval figure than Dante, nor a more perfect expression of the medieval world view than the Divine Comedy. Dante's lifetime was, from most points of view (though not necessarily his own), the high point of the Middle Ages. It was an age of technological marvels, with the first spectacles, the first glass mirrors, the first mechanical clocks and the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping and blast furnaces. Giotto's painting, by universal agreement the beginning of modern art, should probably count as a technological achievement as much as an artistic one. He produced, apparently single-handed, the illusionist ideal of art which ruled until at least 1870 - that the aim of painting was to discover methods that would make the picture "look exactly like the thing itself". Giotto himself discovered some of the most important of these tricks, such as the grouping of figures with one obscuring part of another to indicate depth and the correct use of angles to represent three-dimensional lines on a two dimensional surface. (Giotto'scoretti: Arena Chapel, Padua.) Inventions in other fields had made the world very wide - Europe had more or less regular contact with Greenland in one direction and China in the other. There was a Christian archbishop in Peking and missionary activity in a number of other Asian countries. Marco Polo's account of his travels enjoyed a great vogue. In 1291 the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa set out from Morocco in an attempt to find a sea route around Africa to India. Unfortunately they vanished without trace, but their relatives did establish trading agencies in India, reached by the Red Sea route. An uncritical admiration for the time may, however, be restrained by mention of another of its innovations, cannon. Though a great age in many respects, it was as afflicted by war, plagues, pogroms and misogyny as many another time before and since.

The main intellectual effort of the Middle Ages was of course expended not on technological subjects but on philosophy and theology. Of the great scholastics, two of the most famous, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, were roughly contemporaries of Dante. Although the achievements of medieval philosophy are not easy to appreciate, we can understand something of what was done in science, then considered a branch of philosophy. The history of medieval science has only been treated seriously in comparatively recent times, since it suited the theses of most historians that the medieval scholars should have been poring over ancient books instead of examining the real world. Less culpably, an interest in science and skill in medieval Latin are, in the nature of things, rarely conjoined. But with the excellently chosen texts now available in translation in Edward Grant'sSourcebook in Medieval Science,we can see how good the science of the time really was. One thing that becomes clear is that all the best bits come from the period 1250-1350, that is, Dante's lifetime plus a few years either way. By then the best of Greek and Arab science had been translated and absorbed and new discoveries were being made. Until 1300 the most actively cultivated science was geometrical optics, the leading researchers in which were associated with the Papal court of John XXI in the 1270s. The Pope was himself the author of a book on the subject (besides writing best-sellers on logic and medicine), and in fact died in the pursuit of science when the roof of his laboratory collapsed.

In the next century, it was mechanics that caught the attention of the learned. The importance of this was that the next phase of science and mathematics, represented by Galileo, Descartes and Newton, made its most important discoveries in connection with the motion of bodies. But this was a subject notably absent from the science of antiquity. Motion, and continuous variation in general, seems to have been thought too confusing to be treated rigorously, and there is no suggestion that any kind of measurement might apply to motion. There is no phrase in ancient Greek or Latin equivalent to "kilometres per hour". Even the motion of the planets was treated in terms of the geometry of the heavenly spheres, to which the planets were supposed to be attached. To remedy this situation, what was needed was an identification of continuous variation as a subject and the drawing of some important distinctions between the basic concepts. If there was one thing that medieval philosophy was good at, it was drawing distinctions. The scientists of the Merton School, at Oxford in the 1330s and 1340s, wrote at length on the "intension and remission of forms", that is, the changes of any quantities which could vary continuously. The topic covered the motion of bodies, the gradual change from hot to cold, the variation in brightness over a surface and, according to one of the school, the "intension and remission of certainty with respect to doubt". Their crucial achievement was to distinguish between speed and acceleration, and then between uniform and non-uniform acceleration. They were able to devise what we would express by an equation of uniformly accelerated motion. All this requires mathematical talent of a high order.

The next (and, as it proved, final), steps taken in this direction were the accomplishments of the last and greatest of the medieval scientists, Nicole Oresme. A remarkably versatile thinker, he wrote on such varied subjects as theology and money, but devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics. He invented graphs, one of the few mathematical discoveries since antiquity which are familiar to every reader of the newspapers. He was the first to perform calculations involving probability. He had a good grasp of the relativity of motion, and argued correctly that there was no way to distinguish by observation between the theory then held that the heavens revolve around the earth once a day, and the theory that the heavens are at rest and the earth spins once a day. He was apparently the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock, an image much repeated in later ages. Many of his more technical achievements have also been admired by the experts.

Then everything came to a stop. Given the scientific and mathematical works of Descartes and Galileo, but no chronological information, one might suppose the authors were students of Oresme. Galileo's work on moving bodies is the next step after Oresme's physics; Cartesian geometry follows immediately on Oresme's work on graphs. But we know that the actual chronological gap was 250 years, during which nothing whatever happened in these fields. Nor did any thing of importance occur in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus. Other intellectual fields have no more to offer. Histories of philosophy are naturally able to name philosophers between 1350 and 1600, but their inclusion seems to be on the same principle as world maps which include Wyndham, WA, but leave out Wollongong - big blank spaces must be filled. While it is almost impossible to find an English translation of any philosopher in the three hundred years between Scotus and Descartes, it is not a lack one feels acutely. The intellectual stagnation of those centuries is evident too in the lack of change in the universities: the curriculum which bored Locke at Oxford in 1650 was almost identical to the one which Wyclif found wanting in 1350.

Why was Oresme's generation the last one for two hundred years able to think? There is an obvious suggestion; it was the last to grow up before the Black Death. The plague of 1348-50 killed a third of the people in Europe, and recurrences of the plague and other disasters caused a continuing decline of population for a century. In many ways the order of society gradually fell apart; the process formed the subject of one of the most popular books on history in recent years, Barbara Tuchman'sA Distant Mirror.While violence had not been in short supply earlier, it then reached unheard-of proportions. The years of the plague themselves saw the outbreak of many massacres of Jews, especially in Germany. France and England suffered severely during the Hundred Years War. Although pitched battles were rare, the war proceeded mostly by campaigns of pillage through wide areas of countryside. The cost of regular expeditions was met by oppressive taxation which weakened the economy, and the constant warfare left behind bands of robber barons who lived by local terror and mercenary service. Central governmental authority largely lost its effectiveness. At different times, revolutions by the lower orders seized power in Rome, Florence, Paris, Flanders and London. In all cases suppression and massacre followed. The authority of the Church, hitherto the main influence for unity in Europe, and patron of intellectual life, fared even worse. The Great Schism and its accompanying abuses discredited the Church by creating two rival authorities, mutu mutually excommunicate, and neither with much sanctity to recommend it.

None of this improved much in the fifteenth century, even though the Schism was finally healed and the Hundred Years War ended. In England especially things went from bad to worse when anarchy became normal during the Wars of the Roses. Legal historians record this as a period of degeneration in English law; there was no point in developing the King's law when the King no longer had the means of enforcing it. The world contracted: a nationalist revolution in China wiped out all foreign influences, contact with Greenland was lost, and the Schism caused a loss of interest in the eastern missions. A sign of the times was the fifteenth century's preoccupation with death in art and literature, and presumably in daily life. The walls of churches filled up withdanses macabres,poetry repeated the lesson of mortality almost to the exclusion of anything else, and the worm probably replaced the bird as the most sculpted animal. The figures of the century who have survived in the popular imagination are Joan of Arc, Bluebeard, Dracula and Torquemada, all of them associated with violent death in one form or another.

The effect of these developments on the life of the mind was, not surprisingly, bad. It is not entirely easy to understand what happened in detail, since on the surface things went on as usual. The universities continued to teach the same things, and indeed a number of new universities were founded. But nothing new occurred in them - the university philosophers and theologians of the fifteenth century, for example, are found repeating Ockham almost word for word. At a more popular level of thought, some very odd developments took place in man's general conception of the world. The world became, as it were, covered up by an elaborate web of signs. In the secular field, there was an epidemic of heraldry. Of all sciences, it is perhaps genealogy which is the most intellectually degenerate, being a kind of perversion of the perfectly genuine scientific urge towards system and order, in the same way that philately is a perversion of the will to classification. Heraldry is, if anything, a further step away from genuine thought, in that while genealogy at least studies some actual facts, heraldry is a completely arbitrary system of signs parasitic on genealogy. Even the Wars of the Roses took their names from the symbols of the opposing sides.