Chapter 14 Renaissance Europe, 1400-1500

1. Chapter 14 Renaissance Europe, 1400-1500 A revolution in the arts and learning was in the making. Europeans’ rediscovery of Greek and Roman writers reflected an expanded interest in human achievements and glory. New secular voices celebrating human glory were added to the old prayers for salvation in the afterlife. While the intense study of Latin and Greek writings focused on rhetoric and eloquence in learning, revolutionary techniques in bookmaking, painting, architecture, and music created original forms and expressed a new excitement with the beauty of nature. In the center of this fascinating nature was humanity. [491] 1) In your own words, explain the significance of humanism to the revolution discussed above? Give examples. 2) In your own words, explain the influence of mechanical printing on the same revolution? 3) T or F. Explain. “Expanding interest in human achievements and worldly things meant that Renaissance humanists rejected Christianity.”

2. Primary Source #1 Meat and eggs began to run out, capons and fowl could hardly be found, animals died of pest, swine could not be fed because of the excessive price of fodder. A quarter of wheat or beans or peas sold for twenty shillings, barley for a mark, oats for ten shillings. A quarter of salt was commonly sold for thirty-five shillings, which in former times was unheard of . . . The dearth began in the month of May and lasted until the nativity of the Virgin [September 8]. The summer rains were so heavy that grain could not ripen. It could hardly be gathered and used to make bread down to the said feast day unless it was first put in vessels to dry. Around the end of autumn the dearth was mitigated in part, but toward Christmas it became as bad as before. Bread did not have its usual nourishing power and strength because the grain was not nourished by the warmth of the summer sunshine . . . There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry . . . The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children. SOURCE: Johannes de Trokelowe, English chronicle of Great Famine (1315)

3. Primary Source #2 I am a chieftain of war, and whenever I meet your followers in France, I will drive them out; if they will not obey, I will put them all to death. I am sent here in God’s name, the King of Heaven, to drive you body for body out of all France. If they obey, I will show them mercy. Do not think otherwise; you will not withhold the kingdom of France from God, the King of Kings, Blessed Mary’s Son. The King Charles, the true inheritor, will possess it, for God wills it and has revealed it to him through The Maid, and he will enter Paris with a good company. If you do not believe these tidings from God and The Maid, wherever we find you we shall strike you and make a greater tumult than France has seen in a thousand years. Know well that the King of Heaven will send a greater force to The Maid and her good people than you in all your assaults can overcome; and by blows shall the favor of the God of Heaven be seen . . . Letter written on behalf of Joan of Arc to king of England (1429)

4. Primary Source #3 There is not a limb nor a form, Which does not smell of putrefaction. Before the soul is outside, The heart which wants to burst the body Raises and lifts the chest Which nearly touches the backbone --The face is discolored and pale, And the eyes veiled in the head. Speech fails him, For the tongue cleaves to the palate. The pulse trembles and he pants. The bones are disjointed on all sides; There is not a tendon which does not stretch as to burst. Georges Chastellain (ca. 1415-1475), Le Pas de Mort (The Dance of Death)

5. Primary Source #4 I used to marvel and at the same time to grieve that so many excellent and superior arts and sciences from our most vigorous antique past could seem lacking and almost wholly lost. We know from remaining works and through references to them that they were once widespread. Painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, geometricians, rhetoricians, seers and similar noble and amazing intellects are very rarely found today and there are few to praise them. Thus I believed, as many said, that Nature, the mistress of things, had grown old and tired. She no longer produced either geniuses or giants which in her more youthful and more glorious days she had produced so marvelously and abundantly. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1434)

6. Primary Source #5 But whoever is born in Italy and Greece . . . Has good reason to find fault with his own and to praise the olden times; for in their past there are many things worthy of the highest admiration; whilst the present has nothing that compensates for all the extreme misery, infamy, and degradation of a period where there is neither observance of religion, law, or military discipline, and which is stained by every species of the lowest brutality . . . I know not then, whether I deserve to be classed with those who deceive themselves, if in these DiscoursesI shall praise too much the times of ancient Rome and censure those of our own day. And truly if the virtues that ruled then and the vices that prevail now were not as clear as the sun, I should be more reticent in my expressions, lest I should fall into the very error for which I reproach others. But the matter being so manifest that everybody sees it, I shall boldly and openly say what I think of former times and of the present, so as to excite in the minds of the young men who read my writings the desire to avoid the evils of the latter, and prepare themselves to imitate the virtues of the former . . . Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), The Discourses