The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640

The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640

by William J. Bouwsma
The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640

The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640

by William J. Bouwsma

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Overview

Eminent historian William J. Bouwsma here examines the conventional view of the European Renaissance as the root and foundation of modern culture, arguing instead that while it had a beginning and a climax, the Renaissance also had an ending. Bouwsma examines closely the waning of the Renaissance culture of freedom and creativity, and he offers an interpretation of the place of the Renaissance in modern culture. William J. Bouwsma was Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300097177
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 09/10/2002
Series: Yale Intellectual History of the West Series
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

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Chapter One

The Cultural Community of Europe


Histories of particular European states are of limited use for intellectual and cultural history, which requires larger horizons, especially before the nineteenth century. Although the unity of Latin Christendom had been shattered by the Protestant Reformation and the various entities within Europe were increasingly aware of their differences, a sense of unity, still based on community in religion and culture, persisted. Richard Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, nicely balanced the tensions that persisted between unity and difference in Europe. He was dealing specifically with religion, but his remarks are equally applicable to cultural life. "As the main body of the sea being one, yet within divers precincts hath divers names," he wrote, "so the Catholic Church is in like sort divided into a number of distinct Societies, every of which is termed a Church within it self."


Differences among the Peoples of Europe


By the sixteenth century the various European peoples were increasingly conscious of national identities and differences. Cultivated Italians, though Italy was politically still only a geographical expression, considered themselves linguistically and culturally a nation, and were so regarded abroad. Italy was in this sense more of an entity than Germany or the Netherlands. But even in Germany political fragmentation and vulnerability to papal exploitation had produced resentments that stimulated a sense of national identity eventually contributing to the ProtestantReformation.

    Elsewhere the consciousness of national identity nourished prejudice against other peoples, often expressed in negative stereotypes. These were strongest at the popular level but sometimes repeated by the more cultivated. The Flemish cosmographer Gerard Mercator, in his Atlas of 1585, described his German neighbors as "simple and furious blockheads," "sumptuous and brazen-faced gluttons," "distrustful slovens," and "quarrelsome dissemblers, double-hearted, and opinionative." His own Belgians, on the other hand, were "good horsemen, tender, teachable, and delicate." The Crudities (1611) of Thomas Coryate, who wandered through Europe mostly on foot, described the streets of Paris as the "dirtiest and so the most stinking of all that I saw in my life."

    Italy was commonly resented, in Germany for money supposedly drained away by the demands of the papacy, and everywhere for the high level of its material culture and the lightness and immorality which its amenities supposedly encouraged. This kind of anti-Italianism found particular expression in England, where an anonymous pamphlet that advertised itself as "a Discoverie of the great subtiltie and wonderful wisdome of the Italians, whereby they beare sway over the most part of Christendome, and cunninglie behave themselves to fetch the Quintescence out of the peoples purses." Even the cosmopolitan Sir Philip Sidney described Italians in a letter to his brother as more guilty of "counterfeit learning ... than in any place I do know, for from a tapster upwards they are all discoursers [chatterers]." The supposed wickedness of Niccolò Machiavelli made him into "Old Nick" and a potent symbol of Italian corruption. At the same time English scholars were trying to catch up with Italy. Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster (1568) boasted of the progress of England from its early "rudeness" to a proficiency in learning equal to that of Italy.

    Anti-Italian sentiment had unusually deep roots in France. The notion that French civilization owed everything to the Romans was contested by a rival belief that it came from the more vigorous and freedom-loving Germanic invaders of France. It was also nourished by the medieval conception of a divinely ordained westward movement of learning, first from Athens to Rome and then from Rome to Paris. The lawyer-historian Étienne Pasquier emphasized the geographical separation of France from Italy. "God," he wrote, "wished to divide us by a high thrust of mountains, so he separated us in all things, in manners, in laws, character, humors."

    There was also a positive side to this increasingly articulate nationalism. Jacques-Auguste de Thou opened his History of His Own Time (1604) with a patriotic declaration:


It is a maxim that I have received through hereditary tradition ... that, after what I owe to God, nothing should be more dear and sacred to me than the love and respect owed to my patrie, and that I should cause all other considerations to yield to this. I have brought this sentiment into the administration of affairs, being persuaded, according to the thoughts of the ancients, that the patrie is a second divinity, that its laws come from God, and that those who violate them, with whatever specious pretext of religion they may cover themselves, are sacrilegious and parricidal.


Similar sentiments had inspired Pasquier in 1560 to begin his Recherches de France, a multi-volume study of the medieval origins of French institutions intended to minimize the debt of France to Rome and Italy.

    Meanwhile Spain was developing a sense of national destiny based on the completion in 1492 of its centuries-long crusade to expel the Muslims and on Spanish expansion overseas. The presence in Spain of ethnic minorities also stimulated a special concern for purity of blood. By the latter part of the sixteenth century these impulses had produced a sense of difference from the rest of Europe and a Catholicism unusually sensitive to heresy. Philip II forbade his subjects to travel abroad or attend most foreign universities, and exercised an uncommonly tight control over the publication and importation of books. The result was to strengthen an unusual rigidity in Spanish society and, along with a concern for religious orthodoxy, bring about a stagnation in science and learning. But this did not entirely inhibit Spain from cultural contact with other areas, notably with Catholic central Europe and the Habsburg court in Vienna and Prague. Spanish possessions in Italy and the Netherlands led to cultural appropriations, notably in the arts. Spanish influence was also felt elsewhere. The Habsburg emperor Rudolph II (1576-1612), who had spent much of his adolescence in Spain, continued to dress like a Spaniard, and liked to speak Spanish.


The Cultural Unity of Europe and the Republic of Letters


But intellectual and cultural movements stubbornly refuse to respect political boundaries, and much in such matters was common to all the peoples of Western Europe. Anti-foreign prejudice was criticized by Jean Bodin, who, though he traveled chiefly in books, derided the English for thinking of themselves as stronger than the French; the Italians for condemning "the cunning of the Greeks"; and, briefly mixing ancient and modern examples, the Jews and Egyptians for thinking "the Greeks fickle, as the Italians did the French, and the French the Germans." Bodin also paid tribute, if somewhat sardonically, to the progress of German learning. "As their bodies develop great size," he wrote, "so do their books. Martin [Luther] wrote more and Erasmus wrote more than anyone can read in the course of a long lifetime." A growing sense of the cultural community of Europe appears in a poem of Samuel Daniel, written to accompany the translation of Montaigne's Essays into English (1603), itself a notable example of European cosmopolitanism:


                                                                                            It being the proportion of a happy pen
                                                                                            Not to be invassall'd to one monarchie,
                                                                                            But dwell with all the better world of men
                                                                                            Whose spirits all are of one communitie,
                                                                                            Whom neither oceans, desarts, rockes nor sands
                                                                                            Can keep from the 'intertraffique of the minde.


Continuing Primacy of Italy


Nevertheless, Italy was still the source, as Jacob Burckhardt would put it, of "the breath of life for all the more instructed minds of Europe." In spite of Protestant prejudices, in the sixteenth century, Italy remained a favorite stop on the Grand Tour that completed the education of upper-class Europeans. Italian literature circulated everywhere. The poet Ariosto was a model for Spenser and Cervantes, and Italian stories and plays inspired native theater elsewhere. Italian universities attracted students from abroad, notably in the sciences; and painters and composers came to Italy to learn the latest artistic styles. Rubens in his youth had, as he put it, to "see Italy and to view at first hand the most celebrated works of art, ancient and modern, and to form his art after these models." Montaigne was heavily indebted to Italian humanism, and in his maturity he made an extended trip to Italy, carefully recording his adventures and observations. He brooded over the ruins of ancient Rome, and the Roman authorities honored him with citizenship.

    But the cultural preeminence of Italy was now waning, as Erasmus had noted earlier in the century. This was partly the result of the French invasion in 1494 and the prolonged warfare that followed between the French and Spanish armies, which demonstrated the powerlessness of fragmented Italy to deal politically with the new national monarchies. Power in Europe was being transferred to the western seaboard, its passage accelerated by the voyages of discovery, which favored the Atlantic powers. There was also a growing Protestant reaction to the long cultural predominance of Catholic Italy. After the middle of the sixteenth century European leadership was shifting westward, from Italy to France and—especially in theology—to the freer atmosphere of the Netherlands. Before the end of the century political and legal thinkers, even in Italy, increasingly admired French society and institutions.


Development of the Vernaculars


Meanwhile vernacular languages were replacing Latin even in scholarly publishing as the growth of literacy among the laity increased the demand for books in native tongues. The use of the vernacular for serious purposes had begun in Italy, where the Tuscan dialect was well on the way to becoming a national language. The eminence of Dante and Petrarch in poetry and of Castiglione and Guicciardini in prose promoted the prestige of Italian, though Latin long remained the preferred language of scholarship. By the middle of the century the use of the vernacular was spreading. Sperone Speroni's Dialogue on Languages (1542) justified it by noting the various functions of language. By suggesting the relativity of languages to the circumstances of their origins and their different uses, he directly challenged the traditional view of Latin as the universal language appropriate to all times and places. At about the same time Joachim du Bellay argued in his Defense and Renown of the French Language (1549) for the value of variety among languages. He also predicted a literature in French that would rival that of antiquity. In England, the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster boasted. "I do not think that anie language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, wither with more pith, or greater planesse, than our English tung is." At the same time English was being enriched by new words, from Latin, but also from other languages. Latin itself was increasingly seen as a "dead" language, an adjective first applied to it in 1570. The result was something like a "Galilean revolution" in language, as disruptive of traditional values as the revolution in cosmology.

    The development of the vernaculars received encouragement from other quarters. National governments required records of law and other public documents to be written in their vernaculars rather than dog Latin. French became the official language of the courts and of all public documents in France. In English courts the vernacular was promoted over Latin and the law French used even in England since the time of William the Conqueror by the jurist Edward Coke, who believed in the expressive value of English for every purpose. "Our English language," he wrote, "is as copious and significant, and as able to express anything in as few words, as any other native language that is spoken at this day."

    The Reformations, Catholic as well as Protestant, also promoted the use of the languages of the people. Protestants rejected the Latin liturgy and promoted vernacular translations of the Bible. Meanwhile preaching on both sides implied that the most sublime knowledge was communicable in the vernacular. As one of Bodin's discussants argued in his Colloquium of the Seven Sages, "Nothing is more ridiculous than for priests to use a foreign language which the unlearned do not understand." The expressive power of English was enhanced by the new King James translation of the Bible (1611), as German had been by Luther's vernacular translation. The Catholic reformers Pierre de Bérulle and François de Sales wrote in French for laymen; and the letters of French Jesuits, even those addressed to the generals of the order, were mostly in the vernacular. A French Jesuit proposed to counter the attractions of Protestant psalm-singing in the vernacular by encouraging Catholics to do likewise, in translations by the poet Ronsard. "The French love singing very much," he argued, "and with this weakness the devil has won over a whole world of them." Meanwhile the missionary enthusiast Guillaume Postel called for religious books in the various languages of prospective converts.

    Latin was even being displaced in scholarly communication. In Italy, teaching in philosophy, medicine, and law was increasingly in the vernacular: Galileo wrote about cosmology in Italian, as he explained, so that everybody could read his work: Italian was "capable of dealing with and explaining the concepts of every field of study." Paolo Sarpi used Italian to explain highly technical legal and institutional procedures to lay rulers in his Treatise on Benefices. Peter Ramus broke new ground by publishing philosophical work in French; and Montaigne's Essays demonstrated that French could express serious thought. The publication of learned studies in English had become so well established that Robert Burton, unable to find a publisher willing to print his Anatomy of Melancholy in Latin, was compelled, to his distress to bring it out in English.

    The vernaculars were increasingly used for serious literature. Ronsard, the leading figure in a group of French vernacular poets known as the Pléiade, aimed to produce a vernacular poetry equal to that of antiquity. In England, humanist schoolmasters like Roger Ascham, teacher of the future Queen Elizabeth, and Richard Mulcaster, who taught the poet Spenser, were praising English. Sidney developed vernacular poetry and composed a long vernacular novel, Arcadia. Spenser's Faerie Queene was the first great epic poem in English, and English theater exposed large numbers to the expressive power of the language.

    Vernacular literature was also developing elsewhere. Dutch had its champions, and Dirck Coornhert published works of religious and political controversy in Dutch. In Spain, Cervantes put a defense of the vernacular in the mouth of Don Quixote:


Great Homer did not write in Latin, because he was a Greek, nor Virgil in Greek, because he was a Latin. In fact all the ancients wrote in the tongues they sucked with their mother's milk, and did not go out to seek strange ones to express the greatness of their conceptions. And, that being so, this custom should rightfully be extended to all nations, and the German poet must not be despised for writing in his own language, nor the Castilian, nor the Basque, for writing in his.


    But the triumph of the vernacular was not yet complete. Latin continued to be used in scholarship destined for an international readership. Of the six thousand books in the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1605, only thirty-six were in English. In the schools Latin continued to be emphasized.


Unity: The Republic of Letters


But the linguistic differentiation of Europe should not obscure its cultural unity, now dramatized by contact with new peoples in America and Asia, whose exotic ways underlined the similarities between the peoples of Europe. The common elements even in most variants of European Christianity should not be forgotten. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism was monolithic; both, rather like American political parties, tended to represent political and institutional rather than "religious" choices. What they shared was more profound than most contemporaries realized: for example, basic Augustinian assumptions about the human personality. Their affinities also help to explain the continuing popularity on both sides of the religious divide of such works as Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ. This fundamental community helps to explain the ease of movement for intellectuals between professions of faith: for example, Isaac Casaubon, a Protestant, pensioned and employed by the newly Catholic Henri IV of France, died an Anglican and was buried in Westminster Abbey; Justus Lipsius and François Baudouin, Calvinists, converted to Catholicism. Meanwhile French Catholics were nourished by Spanish, Italian, and Flemish spirituality; and Calvinism allied French, Swiss, Germans, Scots English, and other northern and central Europeans. In addition, like-minded scholars on each side recognized their affinities, corresponded, and read each others' books. One such community of interest included the Calvinist Casaubon, the Lutheran Gerhard Voss (Vossius), the Arminian Hugo Grotius, the Anglican William Bedwell, the Catholic Paolo Sarpi, and various Gallican lawyers who emphasized the autonomy of the French school of law.


Travel Abroad


Travel, widely esteemed for its educational value, often introduced Europeans of the upper classes to other like-minded persons. Italy was a major destination for travelers, among them Montaigne, who believed that "mixing with men is wonderfully useful, and visiting foreign countries to bring back knowledge of the characters and ways of those nations, and to rub and polish our brains by contact with those of others." There was, in his view, "no better school for forming one's life than to set before it constantly the diversity of other lives, ideas, and customs." A character in Sidney's Arcadia remarked that he had gone abroad "that by comparison of many things [he] might ripen [his] judgment." Sidney had done this himself. When he was eighteen he had accompanied a diplomatic mission to Paris and there made many friends; the French king made him a baron and gentleman of the royal bedchamber. From France he proceeded to Germany and then spent the best part of a year in Padua and Venice. He also attended the Frankfurt book fair and later traveled to Florence, Prague, and Cracow. "Hard sure it is to know England," he remarked, "without you know it by comparing it with others." He spoke French well, and he also learned from French and Spanish nobles "the true points of honor." Later he was in touch with scholarly circles in the Netherlands and Prague. A young Netherlander, Pieter Hooft, began a three-year tour of Europe in 1598, visiting Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples and returning by way of Germany.

    There were many reasons to travel. Burton recommended it as a remedy for melancholy. French nobles went abroad to seek military experience or employment after the end of the French civil wars, or as political or religious exiles. Religious refugees found a haven abroad: French Protestants in London and Geneva, free-thinking Italians everywhere. Giordano Bruno was variously in Geneva, Paris, London, Wittenberg, and Prague. In England he lectured at Oxford, later boasting of how well he had done debating with its theologians. He dedicated his Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast to Sidney in England; in France he dedicated another work to Henri III. International diplomacy required travel by ambassadors, who brought their retinues with them. The Spanish domination of Italy attracted many Spaniards, especially to the papal court in this age of the Catholic Reformation. Among them was the Jesuit political writer Juan de Mariana, already a student of Italian political thought. Envoys from the papacy, Venice, Spain, France, England and Russia resided at the Habsburg court in Vienna.

    Francis Bacon, who as a youth spent years on the continent, advised travelers to call on "eminent persons in all kinds, which are of great name abroad, that [they] may be able to tell how the life agreeth with the fame." One of those to whom travelers paid homage was the geographer Ortelius, who kept an autograph album of his visitors and correspondents; it includes signatories from England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Germany. The papacy itself was relatively hospitable to Protestant visitors, perhaps in the hope of converting them.

    Published accounts of foreign travel further stimulated interest in foreign parts. At least three such accounts appeared in England between 1611 and 1617: Coryate's Crudities; the Relation of a Journey by George Sandys, which provided much information about the Near East; and the Itinerary of Fynes Moryson, which described European life and manners and gave general advice to would-be travelers. Among other adventures Moryson included a visit in Rome to Cardinal Bellarmine, for which he posed as a Frenchman to avoid identification as a heretic.

    The internationalism of European culture was also facilitated by the presence of foreign communities in major cities. These included merchants, diplomats, and artists with international reputations. Composers and musicians were in special demand. The performances of John Bull, organist in the royal chapel of Elizabeth and James I, were highly regarded in France and Germany; he spent his last years as organist in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Antwerp. Northern painters regularly completed their training in Italy. Artists and scholars from many parts of Europe were attracted by the patronage of the Habsburg court in Prague. Political exiles, among them Florentine republicans escaping the despotism of the Medici, brought Italian books and ideas to Paris.


Universities


The cultural unity of Europe was also promoted by its universities. These still taught mostly in Latin; and they were often, as they had been for centuries, international communities of scholars and students. Over six thousand Germans, most of them, to the distress of the papacy, Protestants, took degrees at the University of Padua between 1550 and 1600. Englishmen studied medicine there, including William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood. So did increasing numbers of Greek and Jewish students. Many Czechs attended universities in France, England, Spain, and the Netherlands. English Protestants studied in Swiss and German universities, English Catholics in Rome and Belgium.

    Much of the intellectual activity of the period still centered on universities. Although the University of Paris languished during the civil wars, in Europe generally university enrollments were burgeoning. In England, the student bodies of Oxford and Cambridge grew rapidly, partly because of the need for well-educated clergy to defend the Protestantism of the Church of England, partly to take advantage of job possibilities in the expanding state bureaucracy. Law was thus an unusually popular field of study at the Inns of Court in London, as it was for similar reasons in Spain. Among older universities that of Padua remained important, its intellectual freedom protected by Venetian rule. The poet Tasso studied philosophy there with Sperone Speroni and rhetoric with Carlo Sigonio; Galileo was converted to Copernicanism at Padua. Charles University in Prague, under the tolerant patronage of Rudolf II, was friendly to the new science as well as to the arts. The University of Louvain had the most prestigious theological faculty in Catholic Europe; Lipsius left Calvinist Leiden for Louvain in 1592 after his conversion to Catholicism.

    New universities in the Protestant Netherlands developed rapidly. The University of Leiden, founded in 1575, was soon the largest in Europe; open to innovation, it developed practical studies such as engineering and new subjects such as Near Eastern languages and geography. Its faculty included two of the greatest scholars in Europe, Lipsius before his conversion, editor and champion of Tacitus, and the textual critic J.J. Scaliger. German universities declined after the Reformation but revived in the later sixteenth century; among the most respected was the Calvinist University of Herborn. In Italy, the prestige of the new Collegio Romano, established by the Jesuits, was growing; excelling in theology, classical and biblical studies, and mathematics, it attracted students from every part of Europe. But in spite of this expansion and the vitality of some universities, all was not well. Then as now, older universities were resistant to change and had largely ignored the innovations of the Renaissance; their curricula and methods remained largely scholastic and Aristotelian, and they tended to perceive themselves as guardians of orthodoxy, whether the orthodoxy of the churches or of governments.

    They had other problems as well. In Catholic countries, especially Spain and the French capital of Paris, they were often in turmoil over Jesuit efforts to penetrate their ranks, especially in faculties of theology. The University of Louvain tried to organize a coalition of Catholic universities to resist the Jesuits. The prestige of Catholic universities also suffered from the transfer to Rome of their traditional role in defining doctrinal orthodoxy. Everywhere universities were also threatened by the encroachment of secular governments. Both Paris and Louvain were compelled by financial distress to admit to their faculties professors designated by the crown; and German universities, which had once attracted many foreign students, became increasingly provincial because of pressure from governments to train local clergy, schoolteachers, and bureaucrats. Rulers also sometimes forbade their subjects to attend universities outside their states.

    Older university men like Burton complained of the decline of learning, which he attributed to the expansion of student bodies by the admission of less-qualified students. "For what do we expect can happen," he asked plaintively, "when every day, pell mell, poor sons of Alma Mater, sprung from the soil, mannikins of no rank whatever, are eagerly admitted to degrees?" There was therefore much discussion in England of university reform, but with little result owing to basic disagreements. Puritans, who controlled colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge, objected to scholastic training because, they argued, it left graduates ignorant of Scripture; but Hooker thought that learning would perish under a Puritan regime. For others, reform meant the recovery of humanistic learning.


Learned Societies and Academies


Dissatisfaction with the universities helps to explain the emergence of circles of men with common intellectual or esthetic interests outside the universities. An early example, in the last decades of the sixteenth century, was an informal group, meeting regularly in Venice, that included a number of local patricians, Paolo Sarpi, Galileo during his stay at Padua, and foreign visitors who interested them. Its discussions ranged over scientific, literary, and philosophical questions, and were characterized by one participant as highly democratic and "aiming at understanding the truth." Giordano Bruno, passing through Venice, attended during the period of his greatest interest in French thought; at his heresy trial in 1592, the Inquisition showed some interest in this group, which was also reading Bacon's Essays.

    Other groups of learned Italians were coming together in more formally organized academies. Most of these had broad interests but some had a particular emphasis. In Rome, the Accademia dei Lincei, established in 1603 to discuss mathematics and experimental science, was of particular importance. Interested in the encyclopedic organization of knowledge, it assembled an important library notable for its inclusion of scientific works; Galileo was admitted to the membership in 1611. Bringing together engineers, military men, prelates, and courtiers, it took all knowledge for its province. As its constitution stated, "The Lincean Academy desires as its members philosophers who are eager for real knowledge and will give themselves to the study of nature, especially mathematics; at the same time it will not neglect the ornaments of elegant literature and philosophy, which, like graceful garments, adorn the whole body of science." In Florence, the Accademia della Crusca published in 1612 the first dictionary of any vernacular language, the product of two decades of work.

    The interests of the Accademia degli Incogniti, established in Venice in 1630, were very different. Including most of the intellectuals of Venice, its meetings were staged as debates. With its motto Ignoto Deo (to the unknown God), it aimed to question everything and was sometimes accused of a dangerous freedom of thought. It was particularly important for the origins of opera; members of the academy established the most successful opera theater in Venice.

    Meanwhile similar organizations were appearing in other countries. In Spain, they sprang up in Madrid, Seville, and Valencia. They were organized in Paris after 1620; the most important met at the home of the brothers Pierre and Jacques Dupuy, whose "Académie Putéane" included philosophers, scholars, and scientists, and met daily. Its most distinguished member was Pierre Gassendi, a devout priest who was also an early atomist, a publicist of the new science, and a fierce anti-Aristotelian. Academies devoted to raising standards in the arts were being formed in northern Europe.


Correspondence Networks


Universities and academies brought together learned men of diverse origins who kept in touch with each other; and students, after leaving university, did so through international correspondence networks, often in Latin. Travelers also followed Bacon's advice that a traveler should not "leave the countries where he hath travelled altogether behind him; but maintain a correspondence by letters with those of his acquaintance which are of most worth." Letters exchanged news, opinion, and advice, taking somewhat the place of modern newspapers. In addition, courier services were organized by universities. Books and other items were also exchanged; the English historian William Camden sent part of his history of the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1615) to the French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, and Sarpi sent melon and cauliflower seeds to a correspondent in France.

    Some scholars carried on an enormous correspondence. Between seven and eight thousand letters to and from Grotius have survived. Sarpi wrote often to French and Dutch Protestant scholars as well as to Gallican lawyers and to scientists in the circle of the Dupuy brothers. Hugo Blosius, court librarian in Vienna, drew central Europeans of many kinds into an epistolary community. An interconfessional correspondence network including Spanish, Dutch, English, Swiss, and French scholars discussed biblical scholarship and Near Eastern philology.

    Some scholars circulated or published their letters, for letter-writing was still considered a serious branch of literature in a tradition going back to Cicero. Petrarch and Erasmus both polished and published their letters. Lipsius published his letters to some seven hundred correspondents after preparing them with appropriate attention to his public image.

    Thus, whether through acquaintance at universities, membership in academies, tourism, books, or correspondence, European thinkers and artists constituted an international Republic of Letters. Within this larger community were sub-groups based on common interests: occult, scholarly, scientific, legal, historical, religious, esthetic, even utopian. Such communities provided social and spiritual support for cultural activity at a time when bourgeois republics, once major patrons of Renaissance culture, were disappearing in Italy, and universities everywhere were declining.


Patronage


The patronage by aristocrats and princely courts of artists and intellectuals, whose works had little public market, was essential for their support. Galileo moved in 1610 from the university circles of Pisa and Padua, in which he had developed his ideas, to the court of Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and was supported handsomely; in return, his fame testified to the greatness of his patron. The architects, painters, and poets patronized by rulers created for them an iconography of power that had practical as well as symbolic value.

    International competition among would-be patrons for distinguished artists also facilitated cultural exchange. The emperor Rudolph II was a great collector of artists as well as art, which he purchased all over Europe. A contemporary described him as "the greatest art patron in the world at the present time." The eccentric painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo directed entertainments at Rudolf's court, which was also frequented by the scientists Johann Kepler and Tycho Brahe, a German and a Dane respectively, as well as by the English astrologer John Dee, previously in the service of Queen Elizabeth. The culture of the Spanish court was almost as cosmopolitan. Philip II (1556-98) was the greatest art patron of his time; among the painters he employed were both the Italian Titian and the Flemish Rubens. At the same time printers in the Spanish Netherlands distributed Spanish scholarship throughout Europe. Nor did Philip ignore Spanish artists. Particularly interested in architecture, he built the Escorial, a great palace designed by Juan de Herrera to demonstrate the greatness of Spain. It included a royal residence filled with art of the period, a convent, a church, and a mausoleum for the royal family.

    Other courts of Europe were following the same path. In France, poetry was taken into the service of the crown under the well-educated queen mother, Catherine de' Medici. Royal pensions, gifts, and honors rewarded the group of French poets known as the Pléiade, of whom Ronsard is now best known. Good classicists, they aspired at once to make French the equal of Italian as a literary language and to glorify the French monarchy; they praised the religion of the state and celebrated its policies and its victories.

    The English court under the Tudors had been relatively untouched by the culture of the continent, but with the early Stuarts this began to change. Court masques, in which Ben Jonson collaborated with the architect Inigo Jones, glorified James I (1603-25) as the center of the universe who transformed winter into spring, reduced wilderness to order, made the earth fruitful, and restored the golden age. Charles I (1625-49), whose queen was French, was also surrounded by courtiers with cultural interests developed abroad.

    The papacy and the cardinals residing in Rome constituted another center of courtly patronage. Cardinal Giovanni Ciampoli was an early patron of Galileo, and during the earlier seventeenth century several popes began the transformation of Rome into a city of great architecture that dramatized the power of the church. Urban VIII, himself a classical scholar, employed in this task the great architect and sculptor Giovanni Bernini, who designed among other monuments the colonnade in front of St. Peter's that proclaims the glorious mission of Rome to embrace the world.


Printing


In his celebration of German culture, the fifteenth-century humanist Conrad Celtis had included the invention of printing, which by the sixteenth century had spread everywhere, preserving and disseminating the products of cultural activity and contributing to the cultural unity of Europe. Presses in Venice, Basel, Antwerp, Lyons, Prague, and other places produced books for a European market, publicizing them at regional and international book fairs, especially that of Frankfurt, which put out catalogues of new titles. The preparation of patristic and classical texts for publication also brought groups of scholars together from various countries.

    As literacy grew, book publication became increasingly profitable, and the number of books in print rapidly rose. Between the introduction of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century and the end of the sixteenth, some 28,000 works appeared; in France alone close to a thousand titles were being published every year. Print runs varied but could be as many as five thousand copies. As better texts appeared, philological scholarship rapidly advanced and ancient writings were translated into the various vernaculars, further diffusing classical culture. Thus Montaigne, though knowing little Greek, was able through the translation by Jacques Amyot (1559) to read Plutarch, one of his favorite authors; without such translation, he wrote, "we ignoramuses would have been lost ... thanks to it we now dare to speak and write; from it the ladies give lessons to the schoolmasters; it is our breviary." Texts were also translated from one vernacular to another. Thomas North translated Amyot's French version of Plutarch's Lives into English. The availability in French of the popular German literature of roguery, in English of French romances, and in German of numerous Spanish works, as well as an adaptation of Rabelais in German by Johann Fischart (1575), suggests an even broader audience. Cervantes could read a wide range of Italian authors, some in Spanish translation; his own Don Quixote was popular in England and elsewhere. Both Shakespeare and Francis Bacon had read Montaigne's Essays in the translation by John Florio, who also published an Italian-English dictionary in 1598. Twenty per cent of the works published during the reign of Queen Elizabeth were translations; comparable proportions seem likely elsewhere. In London itself John Wolf specialized in printing books in Italian, including those of Machiavelli. Conversely, William Bedell, as English ambassador to Venice, supplied books by English writers to Sarpi. The works of Italian humanists were generally available north of the Alps, and Italian works on the arts influenced artistic practice elsewhere, notably in France and England. The Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) of Jean Bodin was widely read in its Italian translation.

    The availability of books in vernacular languages also led to the assimilation of words and phrases from one language into others. Purists were troubled by this, but it had obvious advantages. Richard Mulcaster believed that it enriched English, such borrowing being the "prerogative and libertie" of every language.

    Religious books made up the largest category of publications everywhere. Among Protestants the books most in demand were vernacular Bibles: by 1640 some 630,000 English Bibles and 400,000 New Testaments had been printed. As an English bishop observed, charges of heresy against the English church could easily be disproved because "nowadays the Holy Scripture is abroad, the writings of the apostles and the prophets are in print, whereby all truth and Catholic doctrine may be proved, and all heresy may be disproved and confuted." On the other hand, as John Foxe pointed out in his Book of Martyrs (1563), "The Pope, that great Antichrist of Rome, could never have been suppressed ... except this most excellent science of printing had been maintained." But printing was also an instrument of the Catholic Reformation. Printed papal bulls and other ecclesiastical pronouncements helped to centralize the Roman church. Among the scholarly productions of this period were massive editions of the church fathers, as well as works of contemporary devotional writers. The Introduction to the Devout Life (1608) by François de Sales went through five French editions in the author's own lifetime and was translated into other vernacular languages.

    Centralizing national governments also found printing useful. Standard lawbooks and collections of statutes could now be made widely available to local judges. Royal edicts and official opinion could be easily circulated, even—since books and pamphlets were cheap—among the lower classes. The printing press helped to make public opinion a factor in politics.

    There were other, more general, consequences. Instruction manuals and descriptions of distant places for travelers reduced the element of chance in human affairs. Even more profound, though harder to assess, was the experience of readers now confronted with numbered pages, consistent punctuation, running heads, indexes, the regularity of the spatial organization of pages, and other devices that promoted a sense of order. Books also helped to stabilize and standardize the vernacular languages. Such developments shaped expectations and habits of mind that eventually extended beyond readers to a larger public. In addition, books made available vast amounts of new data, making memory less necessary; readers could look up things they had forgotten, past wisdom could be fixed and preserved from generation to generation. As Bacon observed:


the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of a ship was thought so noble ... how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other.


In addition, as Bacon also knew, books could record and disseminate new knowledge, and the awareness of this helped nourish the idea of progress.

    Since books were vastly less expensive than the manuscripts they replaced, many more persons could now afford private libraries. University libraries were also growing rapidly; at Oxford, the Bodleian, endowed in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley, received copies of all books printed in England. Cheaper books circulated among a more popular audience. The advantages of print over oral communication were often celebrated, as by Samuel Purchas:


By speech we utter our minds once, at the present, as present occasions move (and perhaps unadvisably transport us): but by writing Man seemes immortall, conferreth and consulteth with the Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Fathers, Philosophers, Historians, and learnes the wisdome of the Sages which have been in all times before him; yea by the translations or learning the Languages, in all Places and Regions of the World: and lastly, by his own writings surviveth himself, remaines (litera scripta manet) thorow all ages a Teacher and Counsellor to the last of men: yea hereby God holds conference with men, and in his sacred Scripture, as at first in the Tables of Stone, speakes to all.


The printing press figured regularly in the claims of Europeans to superiority over the rest of the world. Guillaume Postel called it "the lance and sword" of the impending triumph of Christ.


Reading and Authorship


The availability of books raised questions about reading. Bacon recognized the problem of selectivity. "Some books," he advised, "are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." Like many modern critics, Montaigne saw the possibility of diverse readings of the same text, which raised questions about the authority commonly attributed to such texts as the Bible, Homer, and Plato. This led him to an unusually active conception of reading. "An able reader," he noted, "often discovers in other men's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects." Sarpi doubted that readers could ever understand with certainty the exact intention of an author. Grotius pointed out that the meaning of a text and even of a word depends on the cultural practice of its time, and this implied that the interpretation of texts required a knowledge of history. Humanists had long recognized this, but in their dogmatic quarrels scholars tended to forget it.

    The widespread circulation of their works also stimulated some writers to a novel consciousness of themselves as authors. A traditional view of authorship as a leisure-time activity for gentlemen had led some fashionable writers to deny a seriousness in their writing that might suggest a need, not consistent with gentle birth, to earn a living. Montaigne knew men who were ashamed to confess that this might be the case. Venetian aristocrats who wrote opera librettos were sometimes reluctant to admit that it was anything but a gentlemanly recreation. But Ben Jonson audaciously published his own works in 1616, thus helping to establish the respectability of authorship; and Cervantes gloried, if somewhat obliquely, in the popularity of Don Quixote, publishing it in two parts, and in the second celebrating the popularity of the first with a testimonial to its wholesomeness:


Children finger it, young people read it; grown men know it by heart, and old men praise it ... there is not a gentleman's antechamber in which you will not find a Don Quixote. When one lays it down, another picks it up; some rush at it; others beg for it. In fact this story is the most delightful and least harmful entertainment ever seen to this day, for nowhere in it is to be found anything even resembling an indelicate expression or an uncatholic thought.


The popularity of such works everywhere was a further tribute to the internationalism of European culture.

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