Historians typically trace the birth of the Renaissance to fourteenth-century Florence. Then, after three centuries, that brilliant era of artistry eventually gave way to the Reformation, with its shift away from humanism, and the Enlightenment, which picked up (and ran) where the likes of Galileo et al left off.
Yet can the study of an age that produced Da Vinci, the printing press, Protestantism, and the emergence of modern science be confined to just a few hundred years? University of Zurich historian Bernd Roeck thinks not. In this door-stopping (nearly 1,200-page) examination of the Renaissance, Roeck traces the roots of the Renaissance as far back as the mid-sixth millennium BCE, when Middle Eastern innovations like agriculture and the wheel arrived in Europe. Like a phoenix rising from ashes, the Renaissance must be understood, Roeck insists, in terms of the miraculous bird’s journey across millennia and miles, from ancient Greece to East Asia, Byzantium, India, and the Arab world, before coming to roost among the soaring church-bell towers of Florence. According to this exceptionally long view of history, modern states are the end result of the Renaissance, a “precondition…and thus a mere phase in one long process” along the path to “global modernization.”
The reaction to this thesis might be a shrug. Isn’t all human history a series of events and developments, with past and present linked together in one way or another? But Roeck is more focused on the “why” than the “how.” Why was the West more successful—economically, scientifically, technologically—than other cultures around the world during the so-called “rise of Europe,” which coincided with and was engendered (Roeck claims) by the Renaissance?
Anticipating potential critics, Roeck acknowledges the “crimes of colonialism and imperialism” as one explanation for Western ascendency, stipulating in his preface that he “intones no hymns” to the horrors and cruelty of either enterprise. He proposes a wide variety of other (far less indictable) reasons for the emergence of the Renaissance and the concurrent rise of the West as a global power, beginning with geography and climate. With no punishing deserts or insuperable mountain ranges to cross (passes crisscross both the Alps and the Pyrenees) plus a navigable network of rivers, Europe was open to trade, travel, and the migration of ideas. Mild winters and hot, dry summers facilitated the cultivation of healthful, Mediterranean-diet crops, an abundance of livestock, and fairly easy living, at least in southern regions.
Prosperity led to the development of the medieval city-state, a pluckier, more independent political entity than the sprawling, sclerotic empires of the past. Education became a focus of an emerging urban class that looked to the Church for answers. Contrary to popular belief, medieval Christianity was not opposed to scientific inquiry and progress. The Church in fact fostered an atmosphere of debate, rooted in Platonic and Aristotelian dialogues, preserved and passed along by Arab scribes and philosophers. We can also trace the Renaissance’s love affair with classical Greek and Roman literature to intellectuals in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (r. 768–814 CE), who considered it “better to copy books than to cultivate vineyards.”
Catapulting those texts from the scriptorium to the public arena around 1440 was the invention of the printing press. This new technology inspired what might be called the world’s first media revolution, providing “Latin Europe with communication possibilities that did not exist (or were not used) in any other culture.”
Taken altogether, these and other factors provided fertile ground for the “world-changing significance” of the Renaissance. The combination of “a lively humanist scene, rich patrons, connections to other artistic centers in Europe, and mathematical mentalities” made Florence the movement’s epicenter. This was the city of the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch (widely regarded as the “father of the Renaissance”) who argued that God gave us our intellects to be used to their fullest potential for his glory. Thus applied, the majestic results were a wonder to behold, such as the city’s most famous architectural feature: the dome of Florence Cathedral, designed by another native son, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446). An artistic and mathematical genius, Brunelleschi embodied the bold, humanistic pride of the age and was the first known person to receive a patent—another Florentine innovation—for his designs.
Patented or not, ideas quickly traveled north to Germany. There, in the small city of Mainz, a former goldsmith’s apprentice, Johannes Gutenberg, set humanity on the path of the information age by fiddling with a technology that drifted west to Europe from China: moveable type printed in ink on paper. Whereas the Chinese preferred block printing, Gutenberg realized that he could quickly produce more printed works on his invention, modeled on wine and olive presses, than the Chinese ever imagined. (In fairness, Gutenberg’s was a less laborious enterprise, since Latin script has far fewer characters than Chinese.)
A proliferation of printed books meant a burgeoning population of readers, many of them older, leading to an increased demand for eyeglasses. Skills perfected in spectacle makers’ workshops led to improvements in the manufacture of lenses, enabling the likes of Copernicus and Kepler, founders of modern astronomy, to peer deeply into the heavens with increasingly sophisticated telescopes. Kepler’s observations of how the planets revolve around the sun with mathematical precision convinced him, as Einstein would put it centuries later, that God does not play dice.
In contrast to Italy’s elegant artfulness, Protestantism offered more sober contributions to the Renaissance. God’s wrath brought on by sinful laziness was the only reasonable explanation for the brutal winters that plagued northern Europe from 1560 to 1630, a period known as the Little Ice Age. The surest remedy was hard work. Once considered “the irksome upshot of original sin,” human labor “now became a civic virtue.” Martin Luther, meanwhile, blamed many of humanity’s woes on the power and prosperity of the clergy. His insistence that “spiritual and temporal life must everywhere be divorced from one another” helped lay the conceptual groundwork for the separation of church and state.
The flip side of all this progress was the “mad, mutual butchery” of the tumultuous religious wars that followed. For an age famous for the exaltation of the human mind and spirit, nowhere on Earth at the time were there as many witches tried and executed (conservative estimates are between fifty thousand and sixty thousand). In 1486, the same year that Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandolo wrote his Oration on the Dignity of Man—a celebration of humanity’s boundless capacity for knowledge—Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer published his witch-hunting manual Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), “a panorama of terror across hundreds of pages full of panicky fear of the devil, sadism, and obsessive misogyny.” Clearly, there still remained plenty of dark corners for the Renaissance to illuminate.
Roeck gives us a lot to chew on. Readers might find this book less intimidating by viewing its chapters as monographs as opposed to an arduous climb up a steep, 1,200-page hill. This is because each section is more or less self-contained: the Classical Era’s contributions, medieval Arab philosophy, the Age of Exploration, etc. Owing to its encyclopedic breadth, this is one of those books a reader can crack open and begin reading without losing track of the overall thread.
Is that a virtue or a flaw? It may be plausible to link the roguish, ribald behavior of monks in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron to the recriminations of the Protestant Reformation. But do we need so much background to do so? The answer really depends on the reader’s patience.
In the end, the explanation for the “longevity of the West’s success” rests upon its “economic data, innovative technological power, and scientific progress.” That success emerged from a long and lively process of rediscovery, assimilation, inventiveness, and outright intellectual-property theft. As Roeck concludes, “no culture buds and blossoms without cross-pollination,” which is certainly true. Yet in an account of history this sweeping, it seems irresponsible to set aside those “crimes of colonialism and imperialism” in the course of the discussion.
What can rightly be said of the Renaissance is that its focus on the dignity of humanity (to update Pico’s phrase) ultimately did lay the groundwork for the concept of human rights, though it took many more centuries for them to be recognized as universal. Given the magnitude of this development alone, Roeck’s lengthy exploration of its roots arguably has merit. With all that the Renaissance readily summons to mind—from the Sistine Chapel to the Gutenberg Bible to the emergence of modern banking—its focus on “nature of freedom and human dignity” is surely one of its greatest products.
The World at First Light
A New History of the Renaissance
Bernd Roeck
Translated by Patrick Baker
Princeton University Press
$45 | 1184 pp.
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