Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course
European History. So, when we left off last time, the Renaissance
was a very big deal, provided you were part of the elite in approximately this part of
the world. Today, we’re going to follow the spread
of the Renaissance to France, England, Spain, the Low Countries, the seventy two bajillion
ministates of central Europe. Also, suddenly there are a lot more books
to read. INTRO
The Renaissance was shaped and promoted by the discovery in the mid-15th century of moveable
type printing. The credit goes mostly to the German goldsmith
and tinkerer Johannes Gutenberg, whose printing press from the 1440s produced the famous Gutenberg
Bible and fueled the spread of printed books. Now, printing techniques, including movable
type, had been used in China for many centuries, but printing could be quicker in Europe because
the Latin alphabet only contained twenty-six characters, and also innovations made the
letters easy to eject and reset to form new words, pamphlets, and newsletters, and then
entire books. In fact, there are books in the Center of
the World today! It’s my favorite center of the world yet! I love books. It’s really hard to exaggerate just how
big a deal printing was. Like, before our friend Gutenberg, most books
in Europe were copied from other books by hand. This was time-consuming and expensive, and
it introduced errors. And it also meant that books were not part
of most people’s lives. Like, if you were among the around 80% of
people in England and France who worked in agriculture at the time, it’s not just that
you didn’t need to learn to read to do your job; there was generally nothing you could
read. But printing changed all of that incredibly
quickly. The first printing press arrived in Venice
in 1469. By 1500, there were 417 printing presses in
the city. In the first fifty years after printing came
to Europe, over 20 million volumes of books were printed. This included the great works from the classical
world that the Renaissance was rediscovering, but also many legal works. And as jurists worked to decipher the meaning
of every Latin word of the corpus of Roman law, the western legal tradition was born. More copies of the Bible were available to
read, and argue about. And new stories and poems could be shared
more widely. Think of it this way: Whether you were interested
in science or literature or law or mathematics, printing meant that more people had the opportunity
to encounter far more voices from across time and space. And as Renaissance ideas spread north fueled
in part by printing, it followed that writers and scholars would see the ideas of humanism
through the lens of local concerns. Also, of course, northern European thinkers
downplayed the movement’s Italian origins. One of the great rules of history is that
whenever Italy has an idea, northern Europe will be like, “Yeah, no. We totally already had that idea like eight
times. Our version is so much different and better. Wait till you see how we do the black death
slash ballet slash fascism slash automatic weapons slash pizza slash defensive-minded
football.” Anyway, Pieter Brueghel’s “Dutch Proverbs”
is one example of how different northern Renaissance art was from its Italian counterparts--Breughel
is still interested in the ideas of humanism in this painting--it’s secular, focused
on people, set in the natural world--but you can see that Breughel’s painting of scruffy
rural villagers acting out ridiculous common wisdom has none of the lyricism or elegance
of, say, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Then again, in many respects, the Northern
renaissance wasn’t so unique--the touchstone was still the classical world and its art
and writing. Florentines had made much of the Roman legal
tradition that empowered the paterfamilias, or the male head of the family, and this was
very much embraced in the north as well. The idea was that 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. And more than that, the well-being of the
larger state depended on the good order of all the families it encompassed, just as the
successes of Rome had rested on familial underpinnings. And if humanism was opening the door to rethinking
current values, some sort of anchor was need to prevent chaos, and people to the north
and south agreed that security was going to rest in the classic tradition of the father’s
legal dominance. In both North and South, humanism also went
radical. Some humanists began regularly teaching—not
just discussing—its principles and its main subject matter: rhetoric, which may not seem
like a big deal to you, but it means that at least in the radical fringe of the Renaissance
world, ancient Latin and Greek were being taught, not just the medieval versions of
those languages--which would eventually contribute to a rethinking of what certain texts actually
said, perhaps most notably The Bible. Also, girls sometimes joined their brothers
in being tutored, a radical idea indeed, although one that could also trace itself back to the
Old Light--in justifying the education of girls, scholars cited ancient women who’d
received tutoring, including Sappho, Aspasia, and Cornelia, the daughter of the Roman general
Scipio. And as humanism grew, so did the number of
universities. European universities had long taught a system
of theology and philosophy known as “scholasticism” that focused on early church teaching and
Aristotelian logic, but now they began to embrace humanism, spending less time studying
religious texts and more time investigating the human condition and thinking about how
to organize human societies, including how to establish and enforce laws. And amid these developments, Desiderius Erasmus
of Rotterdam, also known as the “Prince of the Humanists,” became the commanding
figure in the Northern Renaissance. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble. Erasmus contributed to taking humanism along
its twisted path from ideas of the study of “humans” and the “active life” into
politics. In 1595, he went to study at the University
of Paris and began publishing his opinions on public affairs, including the responsibilities
of a ruler. A prince, he declared in the Education of
a Christian Prince, needed to study the classics and the deeds of worthy ancient leaders. And in these examples he would discover the
means by which great leaders achieved the public good and keep the peace even in troubled
times. he also emphasized the importance of reading
the Bible and the leading Christian authors. It was for this that he came to be known as
advocating for a “middle road” between the pagan ancients and the more recent Christian
thinkers. But he was also at times very critical of
the Catholic Church. Erasmus was also a central figure in the rising
“Republic of Letters,” a growing international community of humanists in Europe. In fact, he corresponded with some five hundred
people around Europe, including everyone from Sir Thomas More to Martin Luther to Pope Leo
X. Aside from his work on Biblical translations,
he also edited, translated, and published ancient pagan texts, like Cicero’s, and
the works of many pivotal religious authors, especially Saint Jerome. He was astonishingly 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 suddenly of dysentery at the age of 69 because, you know, it was the sixteenth
century. Thanks Thought Bubble. Before he died, Erasmus saw the rise of the
Protestant reformation. He disagreed with much of Luther’s teachings,
and remained loyal to the Catholic Church, but Erasmus’s emphasis on inner spirituality
over ritual did in some ways presage Protestantism. Some felt that “Erasmus had laid the egg,
and Luther had hatched it,” but Erasmus dismissed that, saying that “Luther
hatched a different bird entirely.” Also, for the record neither Erasmus nor Martin
Luther could lay eggs, because they were mammals. But now we’re into biology, and getting
a bit ahead of ourselves with the Reformation. Before we start debating how many angels can
fit on the head of a pin, we should acknowledge the other great Renaissance thinker who shaped
what we now call political science--Niccolo Machiavelli, who was like the Erasmus living
in the Upside Down. Machiavelli had been a faithful supporter
of Florence’s republican traditions. After the death of Lorenzo Medici in 1492,
Machiavelli served the republic in several positions. But after Spanish, papal, and other forces
defeated the republic in 1512, Machiavelli was imprisoned and tortured (he was hung by
his wrists until his shoulders were dislocated). He was eventually released after three weeks
in prison and then set out to write his masterwork The Prince, which was only published in 1532,
five years after his death. 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. His most quoted advice focused on whether
a ruler should aim to be loved or feared: “One should wish to be both, but, because
it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.” Machiavelli took a so-called realist views
of politics--he focused on how a prince could retain power, and maintain order. And he was much more interested in what was
effective than what was, like, noble. And unlike many humanists’ focus on maintaining
peace, Machiavelli believed war was necessary--in fact, he wrote a book about it, called Art
of War. He argued that rulers needed to prepare for
war by studying great military leaders of the past, and he believed that effective military
leadership was vital to effective political leadership, because those who win wars get
to gain peace on their terms. But there were also idealists among Renaissance
humanists, like the Englishman Thomas More, who was one of Erasmus’s five billion friends. And a close one in fact. More wrote the classic book Utopia, which
imagines a society without private property, where reason and cooperation have replaced
struggles for glory and power. It’s an odd book--More was a devout Catholic,
and in fact would eventually be executed for opposing King Henry VIII’s turn toward Protestantism,
and yet the seemingly enlightened Utopia is very much not Catholic. Like, the Utopians have married priests, for
instance, and also they can get divorced. But regardless, More believed that humanistic
analysis could lead to widespread peace and prosperity--which by the way I would argue
turned out to be sort of correct, even though A. it would take a while for humanism’s
benefits to be felt, and B. More did not get to enjoy them, on account of being separated
from his head in 1535. A century before More’s Utopia, another
book that imagined an ideal citystate, Book of the City of Ladies, was written by Christine
de Pizan. 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. As you do. She married and had three children, but then
her husband died of the plague, and thereafter she earned her living writing. In 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. So at this point, it’s common at this point
to ask students to think about the relative merits of idealism and realism--is a prince
or princess, or for that matter a student at a high school, better off being loved or
feared? Is it more important for a community to be
fair or stable? Should leaders prioritize virtue or effectiveness? These are big, interesting questions, and
I think they’re worth considering. But I’d also ask you to look at the lens
through which you’re approaching those questions. Machiavelli’s life was marked by endless
wars and shifting alliances. He 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 exactly have an easy life--he
was born out of wedlock and both his parents died of plague when he was a teenager--but
he saw a very different world in northern Europe than Machiavelli saw in Italy, or than
Christine de Pizan saw. Where do you sit in the world, and how might
that shape what kind of community you wish to see? Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time.
