Video 1: Florence and the Renaissance: Crash Course European History #2

●​ The declining population due to disease and war in the 14th century made labor more

valuable.

○​ This forced people to relook at long-held beliefs about how society should be

organized

●​ Florentine author Francesco Petrarca, a.k.a. Petrarch unleashed his critique of 14th

century life.

●​ Petrarch turned to Plato, Cicero and more ancient writers.

○​ He thought of them as “residents of the Old Age”

●​ Petrarch gave the name “Middle Ages” to the age he lived in.

○​ His writing and research helped usher in a New Age we call the Renaissance.

The Renaissance

●​ The Renaissance: revival or renewal

●​ In some ways, the Middle Ages existed simultaneously with the Renaissance.

●​ In Petrach’s hometown, ordinary people were protesting living conditions.

●​ Writers and thinkers of the Renaissance scored through monasteries for ancient works,

written or at least influenced by Roman writers.

●​ Works by Cicero, Tacitus and Quintilian led Renaissance scholars to focus on humanism

○​ This new thought was based on learning about old or ancient ways, especially in

the study of the “humanities”

●​ The three liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic led to theology, philosophy, laws,

and medicine.
 ●​ The study of the humanities focused on human speech, logic, and the correct use of

language.

○​ Language meant: Latin

■​ The ability to write in Latin and perform Latin orations was seen as key to

a fully educated life.

●​ Competence in these fields was seens as crucial to developing self

and a requirement before joining Florentine or Venetian elites.

Patronage

●​ The Italian city-states were the heartland of the early Renaissance.

●​ Artists, composers, writers, and scholars thrived w/ commerce that paid for everything.

●​ Urban merchants and manufacturers brought products and ideas from around

Afro-Eurasia.

●​ Some families achieved immense wealth

○​ This wealth supported the world of renaissance thinkers and artists in a system

called patronage

●​ Banking institutions also started showing up around this time

●​ Bankers funded civic events and the construction of lavish cathedrals

●​ Bankers also backed or personally paid for the building of masterworks in the classical

style.

○​ Other words: Style of the restrained, stately design of the pre-Christian Roman

Empire.

●​ Idea of unpainted marble or porcelain,we don’t paint our neoclassical ones.

●​ Bankers also financed artists needing funds to complete works

●​ City governments were also important patrons of the Renaissance

●​ Individual leaders spent about 6% of their income on arts.

○​ For what? Status, recognition, possibly love of beauty.

■​ Funding public art and cathedrals served to legitimize the wealth of these

families.

●​ The Church could not condemn merchant wealth if it were to be used to build churches

○​ The governments couldn’t do this either

●​ Paganism is combined with Christianity as it has constantly has throughout Christian

history.

●​ Profit-oriented bankers financed the Church

○​ The Church was run by priests who’d taken a vow of poverty, and founded by a

figure who in the gospels overturns the tables of moneylenders in the temple.

●​ In the city-states, access to a more humanistic approach to education boosted economic

growth.

○​ It also fueled the creation of much art and architecture that is still really

influential.

●​ Many city-states participated in the humanist revival, but the main one was Florence.

○​ Artists of the time were following ancient styles and taking them further

○​ Visual artists, like Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo focused on human dignity

and realistic details.

○​ Botticelli’s portraits of Florentine citizens display the distinct features of his

subjects.
 ○​ E.g. Botticelli’s portrait of the long-dead Dante displayed his long, thin, and

pointed nose rather than an idealized, formulaic hero.

■​ E.g. Michelangelo's “David” presents truly human characteristics even as

it sought to copy ancient sculptural styles.

●​ Across the spectrum of Renaissance art, anatomical accuracy flourished

●​ Nature was also glorified in Renaissance art.

●​ The artists of the Renaissance focused on situating a realistically depicted human body.

●​ Amid this period of prosperity and cultural revival, Florentine history was marked by a

succession of economic and natural shocks, class divisions, corporate rivalries, party

struggles, conflicts with the church, and especially political crises.

○​ Threats of external invasion and internal tyranny and discontent from the lower

classes.

●​ Florence took great pride in being a republic, though it was different from contemporary

republics and exceedingly unstable.

■​ Members of Florence’s guilds would basically be draw out of a large

leather bag, if name was drawn, they’d serve on the Signoria

●​ Signoria: ran the city

●​ New Signorias were chosen every two months.

●​ In order to be part of a guild, you’d have to be debt-free, male, and well connected.

●​ Lotteries were often rigged w/ wealthy families tending to win places on the Signoria.

●​ Frequent coups and counter coups

●​ The Republic would often cease to be republican at times and instead, Monarchical.

Video 2: The Northern Renaissance: Crash Course European History #3

●​ Johannes Gutenberg:German goldsmither and tinkerer

○​ Made the printing press in the 1440's and fueled the spread of printed books.

●​ Printing techniques, including the movable type, had been used in China for many

centuries.

●​ Printing could be faster in Europe as the Latin alphabet only contained 26 characters.

○​ In addition, innovations made the letters easy to eject and reset to form new

words, pamphlets, and newsletters, then entire books.

■​ There are books in the center of the world today.

●​ Before Gutenberg, books were hand-copied.

○​ Time-consuming, expensive, allowed errors.

■​ Meant books were not part of most people’s lives

○​ By 1500, there were 417 printing presses in the city.

●​ In the first 50 years, 20,000,000 volumes of books were printed.

○​ Included great works and legal works

●​ As jurists worked to decipher the meaning of every Latin word of the corpus of Roman

law, Western legal tradition was born.

●​ Printing meant that more people had the opportunity to encounter far more voices from

across time and space.

●​ As Renaissance ideas spread North, writers and scholars began to see the ideas of

humanism through the lens of local concerns.

○​ European thinkers also downplayed the movement’s Italian origins.

●​ Pieter Brueghel’s “Dutch Proverbs” is one example of how different northern

Renaissance art is from its Italian counterparts.

○​ Brueghel is still interested in the ideas of humanism in the painting: secular,

focused on people, set in the natural world compared to Botticelli’s lyrical and

elegant Birth of Venus

(Brueghel’s Dutch Proverbs)

Paterfamilias

●​ 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.

●​ The well-being of the larger state depended on the good order of all the families it

encompassed as the successes of Rome had rested on familial underpinnings.

●​ In both the North and South, humanism also went radical.

●​ Some humanists began regularly teaching, not just discussing, its principles and its main

subject matter: rhetoric.

Rhetoric

●​ Ancient Latin and Greece were being taught, not just the medieval versions of those

languages, but The Bible.

●​ Girls would sometimes join their brothers in being tutored, not a popular idea, though it

was an idea in the Old Light– in justifying the education of girls.

○​ Notable women that received tutoring: Sappho, Aspasia, and Cornelia, the

daughter of the Roman general Scipio.

●​ As humanism grew, so did the number of universities.

Aristotelian Logic
 ●​ European universities had long taught a system of theology and philosophy

“scholasticism” that focused on early church teaching and Aristotelian logic.

○​ These universities also embraced humanism.

■​ They spent less time studying religious texts and more time investigating

the human condition and how to organize human societies.

Prince of the Humanists

●​ Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam a.k.a. “Prince of the Humanists” became the

commanding figure in the Northern Renaissance.

●​ In 1595, Erasmus went to study at the University of Paris and began publishing his

opinions on public affairs, including the responsibilities of a ruler.

○​ He would discover the means by which great leaders achieved the public good

and keep the peace even in troubled times.

■​ Emphasized the importance of reading the Bible and the leading Christina

authors.

●​ Erasmus was also a central figure in the rising “Republic of Letters”, a growing

international community of humanists in Europe.

○​ He corresponded w/ ~500 people around Europe, including everyone from Sir

Thomas More to Martin Luther to Pope Leo X.

●​ Erasmus also edited, translated, and published ancient Pagan texts, like Cicero’s, and the

works of many pivotal religious authors, like St. Jerome.

●​ Erasmus was extremely 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 at 69.

Protestantism.

Niccolo Machiavelli

●​ Machiavelli has been a faithful supporter of Florence’s republican traditions.

●​ After the death of Larenzo Medici in 1492, Machiavelli served the republic in several

positions.

●​ After Spanish, papal, and other forces defeated the republic in 1512, Machiavelli was

imprisoned and tortured.

○​ Eventually released after 3 weeks in prison and then set out to write “The Prince”

●​ “The Prince” was published in 1532, after his death.

The Prince

●​ 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.

●​ Machiavelli took a so-called realist view of politics–he focused on how a prince could

retain power, and maintain order.

●​ Unlike many humanist’s focus on maintaining peace, Machiavelli believed war was

necessary

○​ He wrote a book on it: Art of War

of the past, and he also believed that effective military leadership was vital to effective

political leadership, because “those who win wars get to gain peace on their terms”

●​ There were also idealists among Renaissance humanists, like Englishman Thomas More,

one of Erasmus’s many, many friends.

○​ Though a close one.

●​ More was a devout Catholic, and in fact would be executed for opposing King Henry

VII’s turn toward Protestantism, and yet the seemingly enlightened Utopia is very much

not Catholic.

●​ Like, the Utopians have married priests, and they would also be able to divorce.

●​ More believed that humanistic analysis could lead to widespread peace and prosperity

●​ A century before More’s Utopia, another book that imagined an ideal city-state, Book of

the City of Ladies, was written by Christine de Pizan.

Book of the City of Ladies

●​ 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.

●​ She married and had 3 children, but her husband died to the Plague, and thereafter she

earned her living writing.

●​ In the 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.
 ○​ Merits of idealism or realism?

○​ Better off being loved or feared?

○​ Community to be fair or stable?

○​ Leaders prioritizing virtue or effectiveness?

●​ Machiavelli’s life was marked by endless wars and shifting alliances.

○​ 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 live an easy life, born out of wedlock, both parents dying of the plague

when he was a teen.

●​ Perspective matters.