An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

The Renaissance, or new birth.

120. The thirteenth century had been, as we have seen, a period of great enthusiasm for learning. The new universities attracted students from all parts of Europe, and famous thinkers like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon wrote great treatises on religion, science, and philosophy. The public delighted in the songs and romances composed and recited in the language of the people. The builders contrived a new and beautiful style of architecture, and, with the aid of the sculptors, produced buildings which have never since been surpassed and rarely equaled. Why, then, are the two succeeding centuries called the period of the new birth,—the Renaissance,—as if there was a sudden reawakening after a long sleep, as if Europe first began in the fourteenth century to turn to books and art?

The word renaissance was originally used by writers who had very little appreciation of the achievements of the thirteenth century. They imagined that there could have been no high degree of culture during a period when the Latin and Greek classics, which seemed so all-important to them, were not carefully studied. But it is now coming to be generally recognized that the thirteenth century had worthy intellectual and artistic ambitions, although they were different both from those of Greece and Rome and from our own.

We cannot, therefore, conceive the "new birth" of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries quite as it was viewed by writers of a century ago, who failed to do justice to the preceding period. Nevertheless, about the middle of the fourteenth century, a very great and fundamental change did begin in thought and taste, in books, buildings, and pictures, and this change we may very well continue to call the Renaissance. We can best judge of its nature by considering the work of the two greatest men of the fourteenth century, Dante and Petrarch.

Dante, 1264–1321.

Dante was first and foremost a poet, and is often ranked with Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare. He is, however, interesting to the historian for other things than his flights of fancy and the music of his verse. He had mastered all the learning of his day; he was a scientist and a scholar as well as a poet. His writings show us how the world appeared about the year 1300 to a very acute mind, and what was the range of knowledge available to the most thoughtful men of that day.

Dante's use of Italian.

Dante was not a churchman, as were all the scholars whom we have hitherto considered. He was the first literary layman of renown since Boethius,[219] and he was interested in helping other laymen who knew only their mother tongue to the knowledge heretofore open only to those who could read Latin. In spite of his ability to write Latin, he chose the mother tongue for his great poem, The Divine Comedy. Italian was the last of the important modern languages to develop, perhaps because in Italy Latin remained longest intelligible to the mass of the people. But Dante believed that the exclusive use of Latin for literary purposes had already in his time become an affectation. He was confident that there were many people, both men and women, who knew only Italian, who would gladly read not only his verses but his treatise on science,—The Banquet,[220] as he poetically calls it.

Extent of Dante's knowledge.

Dante's writings indicate that mediæval scholars were by no means so ignorant of the universe as they are popularly supposed to have been. Although they believed, like the ancients, that the earth was the center around which the sun and stars revolved, they were familiar with some important astronomical phenomena. They knew that the earth was a sphere and guessed very nearly its real size. They knew that everything that had weight was attracted towards its center, and that there would be no danger of falling off should one get on the opposite side of the globe; they realized also that when it was day on one side of the earth it was night on the other.