7. ... The power and authority to govern and to control the public affairs of the said kingdom shall, during our life-time, be vested in our son, King Henry, with the advice of the nobles and the wise men who are obedient to us, and who have consideration for the advancement and honor of the said kingdom....
22. It is agreed that during our life-time we shall designate our son, King Henry, in the French language in this fashion, Notre Henry's title très cher fils Henri, roi d'Angleterre, héritier de France; and in the Latin language in this manner, Noster præcarissimus filius Henricus, rex Angliæ, heres Franciæ.
24. ... [It is agreed] that the two kingdoms shall be governed from the time that our said son, or any of his heirs, shall assume the crown, not divided between different kings at Union of France and England to be through the crown only the same time, but under one person, who shall be king and sovereign lord of both kingdoms, observing all pledges and all other things, to each kingdom its rights, liberties or customs, usages and laws, not submitting in any manner one kingdom to the other.[599]
29. In consideration of the frightful and astounding crimes and misdeeds committed against the kingdom of France by Charles, the said Dauphin, it is agreed that we, our son Henry, and also our very dear son Philip, duke of Burgundy, will never treat for peace or amity with the said Charles.[600]
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
The question as to when the Middle Ages came to an end cannot be answered with a specific date, or even with a particular century. The transition from the mediæval world to the modern was gradual and was accomplished at a much earlier period in some lines than in others. Roughly speaking, the change fell within the two centuries and a half from 1300 to 1550. This transitional epoch is commonly designated the Age of the Renaissance, though if the term is taken in its most proper sense as denoting the flowering of an old into a new culture it scarcely does justice to the period, for political and religious developments in these centuries were not less fundamental than the revival and fresh stimulus of culture. But in the earlier portion of the period, particularly the fourteenth century, the intellectual awakening was the most obvious feature of the movement and, for the time being, the most important.
The renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was not the first that Europe had known. There had been a notable revival of learning in the time of Charlemagne—the so-called Carolingian renaissance; another at the end of the tenth century, in the time of the Emperor Otto III. and Pope Sylvester II.; and a third in the twelfth century, with its center in northern France. The first two, however, had proved quite transitory, and even the third and most promising had dried up in the fruitless philosophy of the scholastics.
Before there could be a vital and permanent intellectual revival it was indispensable that the mediæval attitude of mind undergo a fundamental change. This attitude may be summed up in the one phrase, the absolute dominance of "authority"—the authority, primarily, of the Church, supplemented by the writings of a few ancients like Aristotle. The scholars of the earlier Middle Ages busied themselves, not with research and investigation whereby to increase knowledge, but rather with commenting on the Scriptures, the writings of the Church fathers, and Aristotle, and drawing conclusions and inferences by reasoning from these accepted authorities. There was no disposition to question what was found in the books, or to supplement it with fresh information. Only after about 1300 did human interests become sufficiently broadened to make men no longer altogether content with the mere process of threshing over the old straw. Gradually there began to appear scholars who suggested the idea, novel for the day, that the books did not contain all that was worth knowing, and also that perchance some things that had long gone unquestioned just because they were in the books were not true after all. In other words, they proposed to investigate things for themselves and to apply the tests of observation and impartial reason.
The most influential factor in producing this change of attitude was the revival of classical literature and learning. The Latin classics, and even some of the Greek, had not been unknown in the earlier Middle Ages, but they had not been read widely, and when read at all they had been valued principally as models of rhetoric rather than as a living literature to be enjoyed for the ideas that were contained in it and the forms in which they were expressed. These ideas were, of course, generally pagan, and that in itself was enough to cause the Church to look askance at the use of classical writings, except for grammatical or antiquarian purposes. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, due to a variety of causes, the reading of the classics became commoner than since Roman days, and men, bringing to them more open minds, were profoundly attracted by the fresh, original, human ideas of life and the world with which Vergil and Horace and Cicero, for example, overflowed. It was all a new discovery of the world and of man, and from the humanitas which the scholars found set forth as the classical conception of culture they themselves took the name of "humanists," while the subjects of their studies came to be known as the litteræ humaniores. This first great phase of the Renaissance—the birth of humanism—found its finest expression in Dante and Petrarch, and it cannot be studied with better effect than in certain of the writings of these two men.