the Fourth Week of Advent
free while helping to build churches and support pastors in Uganda.
Click here to learn more!
Bible Encyclopedias
The Renaissance
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or THE. RENAISSANCE - The "Renaissance" or "Renascence" is a term used to indicate a well-known but indefinite space of time and a certain phase in the development of Europe.' On the one hand it denotes the transition from that period of history which we call the middle ages to that which we call modern. On the other hand it implies those changes in the intellectual and moral attitude of the Western nations by which the transition was characterized. If we insist upon the literal and etymological meaning of the word, the Renaissance was a re-birth; and it is needful to inquire of what it was the re-birth. The metaphor of Renaissance may signify the entrance of the European nations upon a fresh stage of vital energy in general, implying a fuller consciousness and a freer exercise of faculties than had belonged to the medieval period. Or it may mean the resuscitation of simply intellectual activities, stimulated by the revival of antique learning and its application to the arts and literatures of modern peoples. Upon our choice between these two interpretations of the word depend important differences in any treatment of the subject. The former has the disadvantage of making it difficult to separate the Renaissance from other historical phases - the Reformation, for example - with which it ought not to be confounded. The latter has the merit of assigning a specific name to a limited series of events and group of facts, which can be distinguished for the purpose of analysis from other events and facts with which they are intimately but not indissolubly connected. In other words, the one definition of Renaissance makes it denote the whole change which came over Europe at the close of the middle ages. The other confines it to what was known by our ancestors as the Revival of Learning. Yet, when we concentrate attention on the recovery of antique culture, we become aware that this was only one phenomenon or symptom of a far wider and more comprehensive alteration in the conditions of the European races. We find it needful to retain both terms, Renaissance and Revival of Learning, and 1 For a somewhat different view of the parcelling out into such periods, see the article Middle Ages.
to show the relations between the series of events and facts which they severally imply. The Revival of Learning must be regarded as a function of that vital energy, an organ of that mental evolution, which brought into existence the modern world, with its new conceptions of philosophy and religion, its reawakened arts and sciences, its firmer grasp on the realities of human nature and the world, its manifold inventions and discoveries, its altered political systems, its expansive and progressive forces. Important as the Revival of Learning undoubtedly was, there are essential factors in the complex called the Renaissance with which it can but remotely be connected. When we analyse the whole group of phenomena which have to be considered, we perceive that some of the most essential have nothing or little to do with the recovery of the classics. These are, briefly speaking, the decay of those great fabrics, church and empire, which ruled the middle ages both as ideas and as realities; the development of nationalities and languages; the enfeeblement of the feudal system throughout Europe; the invention and application of paper, the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing; the exploration of continents beyond the ocean; and the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. Europe in fact had been prepared for a thoroughgoing metamorphosis before that new ideal of human life and culture which the Revival of Learning brought to light had been made manifest. It had recovered from the confusion consequent upon the dissolution of the ancient Roman empire. The Teutonic tribes had been Christianized, civilized and assimilated to the previously Latinized races over whom they exercised the authority of conquerors. Comparative tranquillity and material comfort had succeeded to discord and rough living. Modern nationalities, defined as separate factors in a common system, were ready to co-operate upon the basis of European federation. The ideas of universal monarchy and of indivisible Christendom, incorporated in the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Church, had so far lost their hold that scope was offered for the introduction of new theories both of state and church which would have seemed visionary or impious to the medieval mind. It is therefore obvious that some term, wider than Revival of Learning, descriptive of the change which began to pass over Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, has to be adopted. That of Renaissance, Rinascimento, or Renascence is sufficient for the purpose, though we have to guard against the tyranny of what is after all a metaphor. We must not suffer it to lead us into rhetoric about the deadness and the darkness of the middle ages, or hamper our inquiry with preconceived assumptions that the re-birth in question was in any true sense a return to the irrecoverable pagan past. Nor must we imagine that there was any abrupt break with the middle ages. On the contrary, the Renaissance was rather the last stage of the middle ages, emerging from ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what was original in medieval ideas by the light of classic arts and letters, holding in itself the promise of the modern world. It was therefore a period and a process of transition, fusion, preparation, tentative endeavour. And just at this point the real importance of the Revival of Learning may be indicated. That rediscovery of the classic past restored the confidence in their own faculties to men striving after spiritual freedom; revealed the continuity of history and the identity of human nature in spite of diverse creeds and different customs; held up for emulation masterworks of literature, philosophy and art; provoked inquiry; encouraged criticism; shattered the narrow mental barriers imposed by medieval orthodoxy. Humanism, a word which will often recur in the ensuing paragraphs, denotes a specific bias which the forces liberated in the Renaissance took from contact with the ancient world, - the particular form assumed by human self-esteem at that epoch, - the ideal of life and civilization evolved by the modern nations. It indicates the endeavour of man to reconstitute himself as a free being, not as the thrall of theological despotism, and the peculiar assistance he derived in this effort from Greek and Roman literature, the litterae humaniores, letters leaning rather to the side of man than of divinity.
In this article the Renaissance will be considered as implying a comprehensive movement of the European intellect and will Method toward self-emancipation, toward reassertion of the natural rights of the reason and the senses, toward the conquest of this planet as a place of human occupation, and toward the formation of regulative theories both for states and individuals differing from those of medieval times. The Revival of Learning will be treated as a decisive factor in this process of evolution on a new plan. To exclude the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation wholly from the survey is impossible. These terms indicate moments in the whole process of modern history which were opposed, each to the other, and both to the Renaissance; and it is needful to bear in mind that they have, scientifically speaking, a quite separate existence. Yet if the history of Europe in the 16th century of our era came to be written with the brevity with which we write the history of Europe in the 6th century B.C., it would be difficult at the distance of time implied by that supposition to distinguish the Italian movement of the Renaissance in its origin from the German movement of the Reformation. Both would be seen to have a common startingpoint in the reaction against long dominant ideas which were becoming obsolete, and also in the excitation of faculties which had during the same period been accumulating energy.
The Renaissance, if we try to regard it as a period, was essentially the transition from one historical stage to another. It cannot therefore be confined within strict chronological limits.
There is one date, however, which may be remembered with advantage as the starting-point in time of the Re naissance, after the departure from the middle ages had been definitely and consciously made by the Italians. This is the year 1453, when Constantinople, chosen for his capital by the first Christian emperor of Rome, fell into the hands of the Turk. One of the survivals of the old world, the shadow of what had been the Eastern Empire, now passed suddenly away. Almost at the same date that visionary revival of the Western Empire, which had imposed for six centuries upon the imagination of medieval Europe, hampering Italy and impeding the consolidation of Germany, ceased to reckon among political actualities; while its more robust rival, the Roman Church, seemed likely to sink into the rank of a petty Italian principality. It was demonstrated by the destruction of the Eastern and the dotage of the Western Empire, and by the new papal policy which Nicholas V. inaugurated, that the old order of society was about to be superseded. Nothing remained to check those centrifugal forces in state and church which substituted a confederation of rival European powers for the earlier ideal of universal monarchy, and separate religious constitutions for the previous Catholic unity. At the same time the new learning introduced by the earlier humanists awakened free thought, encouraged curiosity, and prepared the best minds of Europe for speculative audacities from which the schoolmen would have shrunk, and which soon expressed themselves in acts of cosmopolitan importance. If we look a little forward to the years 1492-1500, we obtain a second date of great importance. In these years the expedition of Charles VIII. to Naples opened Italy to French, Spanish and German interference. The leading nations of Europe began to compete for the prize of the peninsula, and learned meanwhile that culture which the Italians had perfected. In these years the secularization of the papacy was carried to its final point by Alexander VI., and the Reformation became inevitable. The same period was marked by the discovery of America, the exploration of the Indian seas, and the consolidation of the Spanish nationality. It also witnessed the application of printing to the diffusion of knowledge. Thus, speaking roughly, the half-century between 1450 and 1500 may be termed the culminating point of the Renaissance. The transition from the medieval to the modern order was now secured if not accomplished, and a Rubicon had been crossed from which no retrogression to the past was possible. Looking yet a little farther, to the years 1527 and 1530, a third decisive date is reached. In the first of these years happened the sack of Rome, in the second the pacification of Italy by Charles V. under a Spanish hegemony. The age of the Renaissance was now closed for the land which gave it birth. The Reformation had taken firm hold on northern Europe. The Counter-Reformation was already imminent.
It must not be imagined that so great a change as that implied by the Renaissance was accomplished without premonitory symptoms and previous endeavours. In the main we mean by it the recovery of freedom for the human spirit after a long period of bondage to oppressive ecclesiastical and political orthodoxy - a return to the liberal and practical conceptions of the world which the nations of antiquity had enjoyed, but upon a new and enlarged platform. This being so, it was inevitable that the finally successful efforts after self-emancipation should have been anticipated from time to time by strivings within the ages that are known as dark and medieval. It is therefore part of the present inquiry to pass in review some of the claimants to be considered precursors of the Renaissance.
First of all must be named the Frank in whose lifetime the dual conception of universal empire and universal church, divinely appointed, sacred and inviolable, began to control the order of European society. Charles the Great (Charlemagne) lent his forces to the plan of resuscitating the Roman empire at a moment when his own power made him the arbiter of western Europe, when the papacy needed his alliance, and when the Eastern Empire had passed under the usurped regency of a female. He modelled an empire, Roman in name but essentially Teutonic, since it owed such substance as its fabric possessed to Frankish armies and the sinews of the German people. As a structure composed of diverF ill-connected parts it fell to pieces at its builder's death, leaving little but the incubus of a memory, the fascination of a mighty name, to dominate the mind of medieval Europe. As an idea, the empire grew in visionary power, and remained one of the chief obstacles in the way of both Italian and German national coherence. Real force was not in it, but rather in that counterpart to its unlimited pretensions, the church, which had evolved it from barbarian night, and which used her own more vital energies for undermining the rival of her creation. Charles the Great, having proclaimed himself successor of the Caesars, was obscurely ambitious of imitating the Augusti also in the sphere of letters. He caused a scheme of humanistic education to be formulated, and gave employment at his court to rhetoricians, of whom Alcuin was the most considerable. But very little came of the revival of learning which Charles is supposed to have encouraged; and the empire he restored was accepted by the medieval intellect in a crudely theological and vaguely mystical spirit. We should, however, here remember that the study of Roman law, which was one important precursory symptom of the Renaissance, owed much to medieval respect for the empire as a divine institution. This, together with the municipal Italian intolerance of the Lombard and Frankish codes, kept alive the practice and. revived the science of Latin jurisprudence at an early period.
Philosophy had attempted to free itself from the trammels of theological orthodoxy in the hardy speculations of some schoolmen, notably of Scotus Erigena and Abelard. These innovators found, however, small support, and were defeated by opponents who used the same logical weapons with authority to back them. Nor were the rationalistic opinions of the Averroists without their value, though the church condemned these deviators from her discipline as heretics. Such medieval materialists, moreover, had but feeble hold upon the substance of real knowledge. Imperfect acquaintance with authors whom they studied in Latin translations made by Jews from Arabic commentaries on Greek texts, together with almost total ignorance of natural laws, condemned them to sterility. Like the other schiomachists of their epoch, they fought with phantoms in a visionary realm. A similar judgment may be passed upon those Paulician, Albigensian, Paterine and Epicurean dissenters from the Catholic creed who opposed the phalanxes of orthodoxy with frail imaginative weapons, and alarmed established orders in the state by the audacity of their communistic opinions. Physical science struggled into feeble life in the cells of Gerbert and Roger Bacon. But these men were accounted magicians by the vulgar; and, while the one eventually assumed the tiara, the other was incarcerated in a dungeon. The schools meanwhile resounded still to the interminable dispute upon abstractions. Are only universals real, or has each name a corresponding entity? From the midst of the Franciscans who had persecuted Roger Bacon because he presumed to know more than was consistent with human humility arose John of Parma, adopting and popularizing the mystic prophecy of Joachim of Flora. The reign of the Father is past; the reign of the Son is passing; the reign of the Spirit is at hand. Such was the formula of the Eternal Gospel, which, as an unconscious forecast of the Renaissance, has attracted retrospective students by its felicity of adaptation to their historical method. Yet we must remember that this bold intuition of the abbot Joachim indicated a monastic reaction against the tyrannies and corruptions of the church, rather than a fertile philosophical conception. The Fraticelli spiritualists, and similar sects who fed their imagination with his doctrine, expired in the flames to which Fra Dolcino Longino and Margharita were consigned. To what extent the accusations of profligate morals brought against these reforming sectarians were justified remains doubtful; and the same uncertainty rests upon the alleged iniquities of the Templars. It is only certain that at this epoch the fabric of Catholic faith was threatened with various forms of prophetic and Oriental mysticism, symptomatic of a widespread desire to grasp at something simpler, purer and less rigid than Latin theology afforded. Devoid of criticism, devoid of sound learning, devoid of a firm hold on the realities of life, these heresies passed away without solid results and were forgotten.
We are too apt to take for granted that the men of the middle ages were immersed in meditations on the other world, and that their = intellectual exercises were confined to abstractions of the / schools, hallucinations of the fancy, allegories, visions.
This assumption applies indeed in a broad sense to that period which was dominated by intolerant theology and deprived of positive knowledge. Yet there are abundant signs that the native human instincts, the natural human appetites, remained unaltered and alive beneath the crust of orthodoxy. In the person of a pope like Boniface VIII. those ineradicable forces of the natural man assumed, if we may trust the depositions of ecclesiastics well acquainted with his life, a form of brutal atheistic cynicism. In the person of an emperor, Frederick II., they emerged under the more agreeable garb of liberal culture and Epicurean scepticism. Frederick dreamed of remodelling society upon a mundane type, which anticipated the large toleration and cosmopolitan enlightenment of the actual Renaissance. But his efforts were defeated by the unrelenting hostility of the church, and by the incapacity of his contemporaries to understand his aims. After being forced in his lifetime to submit to authority, he was consigned by Dante to hell. Frederick's ideal of civilization was derived in a large measure from Provence, where a beautiful culture had prematurely bloomed, filling southern Europe with the perfume of poetry and gentle living. Here, if anywhere, it seemed as though the ecclesiastical and feudal fetters of the middle ages might be broken, and humanity might enter on a new stage of joyous unimpeded evolution. This was, however, not to be. The church preached Simon de Montfort's crusade, and organized Dominic's Inquisition; what Quinet calls the "Renaissance sociale par l'Amour" was extirpated by sword, fire, famine and pestilence. Meanwhile the Provencal poets had developed their modern language with incomparable richness and dexterity, creating forms of verse and modes of emotional expression which determined the latest medieval phase of literature in Europe. The naturalism of which we have been speaking found free utterance now in the fabliaux of jongleurs, lyrics of minnesingers, tales of trouveres, romances of Arthur and his knights - compositions varied in type and tone, but in all of which sincere passion and real enjoyment of life pierce through the thin veil of chivalrous mysticism or of allegory with which they were sometimes conventionally draped. The tales of Lancelot and Tristram, the lives of the troubadours and the Wachtlieder of the minnesingers, sufficiently prove with what sensual freedom a knight loved the lady whom custom and art made him profess to worship as a saint. We do not need to be reminded that Beatrice's adorer had a wife and children, or that Laura's poet owned a son and daughter by a concubine, in order to perceive that the mystic passion of chivalry was compatible in the middle ages with commonplace matrimony or vulgar illegitimate connexions. But perhaps the most convincing testimony to the presence of this ineradicable naturalism is afforded by the Latin songs of wandering students, known as Carmina Burana, written by the self-styled Goliardi. In these compositions, remarkable for their lacile handling of medieval Latin rhymes and rhythms, the allegorizing mysticism which envelops chivalrous poetry is discarded. Love is treated from a frankly carnal point of view. Bacchus and Venus go hand in hand, as in the ancient anteChristian age. The open-air enjoyments of the wood, the field, the dance upon the village green, are sung with juvenile lightheartedness. No grave note, warning us that the pleasures of this earth are fleeting, that the visible world is but a symbol of the invisible, that human life is a probation for the life beyond, interrupts the tinkling music as of castanets and tripping feet which gives a novel charm to these unique relics of the 13th century. Goliardic poetry is further curious as showing how the classics even at that early period were a fountain-head of pagan inspiration. In the taverns and low places of amusement haunted by those lettered songsters, on the open road and in the forests trodden by their vagrant feet, the deities of Greece and Rome were not in exile, but at home within the hearts of living men. Thus, while Christendom was still preoccupied with the Crusades, two main forces of the Renaissance, naturalism and enthusiasm for antique modes of feeling, already brought their latent potency to light, prematurely indeed and precociously, yet with a promise that was destined to be kept.
When due regard is paid to these miscellaneous evidences of intellectual and sensual freedom during the middle ages, it will be seen that there were by no means lacking elements of native vigour ready to burst forth. What was wanting was not vitality and licence, not audacity of speculation, not lawless instinct or rebellious impulse. It was rather the right touch on life, the right feeling for human independence, the right way of approaching the materials of philosophy, religion, scholarship and literature, that failed. The courage that is born of knowledge, the calm strength begotten by a positive attitude of mind, face to face with the dominant over-shadowing Sphinx of theology, were lacking. We may fairly say that natural and untaught people had more of the just intuition that was needed than learned folk trained in the schools. But these people were rendered licentious in revolt or impotent for salutary action by ignorance, by terror, by uneasy dread of the doom declared for heretics and rebels. The massive vengeance of the church hung over them, like a heavy sword suspended in the cloudy air. Superstition and stupidity hedged them in on every side, so that sorcery and magic seemed the only means of winning power over nature or insight into mysteries surrounding human life. The path from darkness to light was lost; thought was involved in allegory; the study of nature had been perverted into an inept system of grotesque and pious parablemongering; the pursuit of truth had become a game of wordy dialectics. The other world, with its imagined heaven and hell, haunted the conscience like a nightmare. However sweet this world seemed, however fair the flesh, both world and flesh were theoretically given over to the devil. It was not worth while to master and economize the resources of this earth, to utilize the good and ameliorate the evils of this life, while every one agreed, in theory at any rate, that the present was but a bad prelude to an infinitely worse or infinitely better future. To escape from these preoccupations and prejudices except upon the path of conscious and deliberate sin was impossible for all but minds of rarest quality and courage; and these were too often reduced to the recantation of their supposed errors no less by some secret clinging sense of guilt than by the church's iron hand. Man and the actual universe kept on reasserting their rights and claims, announcing their goodliness and delightfulness, in one way or another; but they were always being thrust back again into Cimmerian regions of abstractions, fictions, visions, spectral hopes and fears, in the midst of which the intellect somnambulistically moved upon an unknown way.
At this point the Revival of Learning intervened to determine the course of the Renaissance. Medieval students possessed a considerable portion of the Latin classics, though Italy Greek had become in the fullest sense of the phrase Revival of a dead language. But what they retained of ancient literature they could not comprehend in the right spirit. Between them and the text of poet or historian hung a veil of mysticism, a vapour of misapprehension. The odour of unsanctity clung around those relics of the pagan past. Men bred in the cloister and the lecture-room of the logicians, trained in scholastic disputations, versed in allegorical interpretations of the plainest words and most apparent facts, could not find the key which might unlock those stores of wisdom and of beauty. Petrarch first opened a new method in scholarship, and revealed what we denote as humanism. In his teaching lay the twofold discovery of man and of the world. For humanism, which was the vital element in the Revival of Learning, consists mainly of a just perception of the dignity of man as a rational, volitional and sentient being, born upon this earth with a right to use it and enjoy it. Humanism implied the rejection of those visions of a future and imagined state of souls as the only absolute reality, which had fascinated the imagination of the middle ages. It involved a vivid recognition of the goodliness of man and nature, displayed in the great monuments of human power recovered from the past. It stimulated the curiosity of latent sensibilities, provoked fresh inquisition into the groundwork of existence, and strengthened man's self-esteem by knowledge of what men had thought and felt and done in ages when Christianity was not. It roused a desire to reappropriate the whole abandoned provinces of mundane energy, and a hope to emulate antiquity in works of living loveliness and vigour. The Italians of the 14th century, more precocious than the other European races, were ripe for this emancipation of enslaved intelligence. In the classics they found the food which was required to nourish the new spirit; and a variety of circumstances, among which must be reckoned the pride of a nation boasting of its descent from the Populus Romanus, rendered them apt to fling aside the obstacles that had impeded the free action of the mind through many centuries. Petrarch not only set his countrymen upon the right method of studying the Latin classics, but he also divined the importance of recovering a knowledge of Greek literature. To this task Boccaccio addressed himself; and he was followed by numerous Italian enthusiasts, who visited Byzantium before its fall as the sacred city of a new revelation. The next step was to collect MSS., to hunt out, copy and preserve the precious relics of the past. In this work of accumulation Guarino and Filelfo, Aurispa and Poggio, took the chief part, aided by the wealth of Italian patricians, merchant-princes and despots, who were inspired by the sacred thirst for learning. Learning was then no mere pursuit of a special and recluse class. It was fashionable and it was passionate, pervading all society with the fervour of romance. For a generation nursed in decadent scholasticism and stereotyped theological formulae it was the fountain of renascent youth, beauty and freedom, the shape in which the Helen of art and poetry appeared to the ravished eyes of medieval Faustus. It was the resurrection of the mightiest spirits of the past. "I go," said Cyriac of Ancona, the indefatigable though uncritical explorer of antiquities, "I go to awake the dead !" This was the enthusiasm, this the vitalizing faith, which made the work of scholarship in the i 5th century so highly strung and ardent. The men who followed it knew that they were restoring humanity to its birthright after the expatriation of ten centuries. They were instinctively aware that the effort was for liberty of action, thought and conscience in the future. This conviction made young men leave their loves and pleasures, grave men quit their counting-houses, churchmen desert their missals, to crowd the lecture-rooms of philologers and rhetoricians. When Greek had been acquired, MSS. accumulated, libraries and museums formed, came the age of printers and expositors. Aldus Manutius in Italy, Froben in Basel, the Etiennes in Paris, committed to the press what the investigators had recovered. Nor were there wanting men who dedicated their powers to Hebrew and Oriental erudition, laying, together with the Grecians, a basis for those Biblical studies which advanced the Reformation. Meanwhile the languages of Greece and Rome had been so thoroughly appropriated that a final race of scholars, headed by Politian, Pontano, Valla, handled once again in verse and prose both antique dialects, and thrilled the ears of Europe with new-made pagan melodies. The church itself at this epoch lent its influence to the prevalent enthusiasm. Nicholas V. and Leo X., not to mention intervening popes who showed themselves tolerant of humanistic culture, were heroes of the classical revival. Scholarship became the surest path of advancement to ecclesiastical and political honours. Italy was one great school of the new learning at the moment when the German, French and Spanish nations were invited to her feast.
It will be well to describe briefly, but in detail, what this meeting of the modern with the ancient mind effected over the whole field of intellectual interests. In doing so, we must be careful to remember that the study of the classics did but give a special impulse to pent-up energies which were bound in one way or another to assert their independence. Without the Revival of Learning the direction of those forces would have been different; but that novel intuition into the nature of the world and man which constitutes what we describe as Renaissance must have emerged. As the facts, however, stand before us, it is impossible to dissociate the rejection of the other world as the sole reality, the joyous acceptance of this world as a place to live and act in, the conviction that "the proper study of mankind is man," from humanism. Humanism, as it actually appeared in Italy, was positive in its conception of the problems to be solved, pagan in its contempt for medieval mysticism, invigorated for sensuous enjoyment by contact with antiquity, yet holding in itself the germ of new religious aspirations, profounder science and sterner probings of the mysteries of life than had been attempted even by the ancients. The operation of this humanistic spirit has now to be traced.
It is obvious that Italian literature owed little at the outset to the Revival of Learning. The Divine Comedy, the Canzoniere and the Decameron were works of monumental art, deriving neither form nor inspiration immediately from the classic's, but applying the originality of Italian genius Petrarch to matter drawn from previous medieval sources. Dante showed both in his epic poem and in his lyrics that he had not abandoned the sphere of contemporary thought.
Allegory and theology, the vision and the symbol, still Revival Learning. determine the form of masterpieces which for perfection of workmanship and for emancipated force of intellect rank among the highest products of the human mind. Yet they are not medieval in the same sense as the song of Roland or the Arthurian cycle. They proved that, though Italy came late into the realm of literature, her action was destined to be decisive and alterative by the introduction of a new spirit, a firmer and more positive grasp on life and art. These qualities she owed to her material prosperity, to her freedom from feudalism, to her secularized church, her commercial nobility, her political independence in a federation of small states. Petrarch and Boccaccio, though they both held the medieval doctrine that literature should teach some abstruse truth beneath a veil of fiction, differed from Dante in this that their poetry and prose in the vernacular abandoned both allegory and symbol. In their practice they ignored their theory. Petrarch's lyrics continue the Provencal tradition as it had been reformed in Tuscany, with a subtler and more modern analysis of emotion, a purer and more chastened style, than his masters could boast. Boccaccio's tales, in like manner, continue the tradition of the fabliaux, raising that literary species to the rank of finished art, enriching it with humour and strengthening its substance by keen insight into all varieties of character. The Canzoniere and the Decameron distinguish themselves from medieval literature, not by any return to classical precedents, but by free self-conscious handling of human nature. So much had to be premised in order to make it clear in what relation humanism stood to the Renaissance, since the Italian work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio is sufficient to indicate the re-birth of the spirit after ages of apparent deadness. Had the Revival of Learning not intervened it is probable that the vigorous efforts of these writers alone would have inaugurated a new age of European culture. Yet, while noting this reservation of judgment, it must also be remarked that all three felt themselves under some peculiar obligation to the classics. Dante, medieval as his temper seems to us, chose Virgil for his guide, and ascribed his mastery of style to the study of Virgilian poetry. Petrarch and Boccaccio were, as we have seen, the pioneers of the new learning. They held their writings in the vernacular cheap, and initiated that contempt for the mother tongue which was a note of the earlier Renaissance. Giovanni Villani, the first chronicler who used Italian for the compilation of a methodical history, tells us how he was impelled to write by musing on the ruins of Rome and thinking of the vanished greatness of the Latin race. We have therefore to recognize that the four greatest writers of the 14th century, while the Revival of Learning was yet in its cradle, each after his own fashion acknowledged the vivifying touch upon their spirit of the antique genius. They seem to have been conscious that they could not give the desired impulse to modern literature and art without contact with the classics; and, in spite of the splendour of their achievements in Italian, they found no immediate followers upon that path.
The fascination of pure study was so powerful, the Italians at that epoch were so eager to recover the past, that during the 15th century we have before our eyes the spectacle of this great nation deviating from the course of development begun in poetry by Dante and Petrarch, in prose by Boccaccio ism to and Villani, into the channels of scholarship and anti- - quarian research. The language of the Canzoniere and Decameron was abandoned for revived Latin and discovered Greek. Acquisition supplanted invention; imitation of classical authors suppressed originality of style. The energies of the Italian people were devoted to transcribing codices, settling. texts, translating Greek books into Latin, compiling grammars, commentaries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, epitomes and ephemerides. During this century the best histories - Bruno's and Poggio's annals of Florence, for example - were composed in Latin after the manner of Livy. The best dissertations, Landino's Camaldunenses, Valla's De Voluptate, were laboured imitations of Cicero's Tusculans. The best verses, Pontano's elegies, Politian's hexameters, were in like manner Latin; public orations upon ceremonial occasions were delivered in the Latin tongue; correspondence, official and familiar, was carried on in the same language; even the fabliaux received, in Poggio's Facetiae. a dress of elegant Latinity. The noticeable barrenness of Italian literature at this period is referable to the fact that men of genius and talent devoted themselves to erudition and struggled to express their thoughts and feelings in a speech which was not natural. Yet they were engaged in a work of incalculable importance. At the close of the century the knowledge of Greece and Rome had been reappropriated and placed beyond the possibility of destruction; the chasm between the old and new world had been bridged; medieval modes of thinking and discussing had been superseded; the staple of education, the common culture which has brought all Europe into intellectual agreement, was already in existence. Humanism was now an actuality. Owing to the uncritical veneration for antiquity which then prevailed, it had received a strong tincture of pedantry. Its professors, in their revolt against the middle ages, made light of Christianity and paraded paganism. What was even worse from an artistic point of view, they had contracted puerilities of style, vanities of rhetoric, stupidities of wearisome citation. Still, at the opening of the 16th century, it became manifest what fruits of noble quality the Revival of Letters was about to bring forth for modern literature. Two great scholars, Lorenzo de' Medici and Politian, had already returned to the practice of Italian poetry. Their work is the first absolutely modern work, - modern in the sense of having absorbed the stores of classic learning and reproduced those treasures in forms of simple, natural, native beauty. Boiardo occupies a similar position by the fusion of classic mythology with chivalrous romance in his Orlando Innamorato. But the victor's laurels were reserved for Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso is the purest and most perfect extant example of Renaissance poetry. It was not merely in what they had acquired and assimilated from the classics that these poets showed the transformation effected in the field of literature by humanism. The whole method and spirit of medieval art had been abandoned. That of the Cinque Cento is positive, defined, mundane. The deity, if deity there be, that rules in it, is beauty. Interest is confined to the actions, passions, sufferings and joys of human life, to its pathetic, tragic, humorous and sentimental incidents. Of the state of souls beyond the grave we hear and are supposed to care nothing. In the drama the pedantry of the Revival, which had not injured romantic literature, made itself perniciously felt. Rules were collected from Horace and Aristotle. Seneca was chosen as the model of tragedy; Plautus and Terence supplied the groundwork of comedy. Thus in the plays of Rucellai, Trissino, Sperone and other tragic poets the nobler elements of humanism, considered as a revelation of the world and man, obtained no free development. Even the comedies of the best authors are too observant of Latin precedents, although some pieces of Machiavelli, Ariosto, Aretino, Cecchi and Gelli are admirable for vivid delineation of contemporary manners.
The relation of the plastic arts to the revival of learning is similar to that which has been sketched in the case of poetry. Cimabue started with work which owed nothing directly to anti quity. At about the same time Niccola Pisano (d. 1278) studied the style of sculpture in fragments of Graeco-Roman marbles. His manner influenced Giotto, who set painting on a forward path. Fortunately for the unimpeded expansion of Italian art, little was brought to light of antique workmanship during the 14th and 15th centuries. The classical stimulus came to painters, sculptors and architects chiefly through literature. Therefore there was narrow scope for imitation, and the right spirit of humanism displayed itself in a passionate study of perspective, nature and the nude. Yet we find in the writings of Ghiberti and Alberti, we notice in the masterpieces of these men and their compeers Brunelleschi and Donatello, how even in the 15th century the minds of artists were fascinated by what survived of classic grace and science. Gradually, as the race became penetrated with antique thought, the earlier Christian motives of the arts yielded to pagan subjects. Gothic architecture, which had always flourished feebly on Italian soil, was supplanted by a hybrid Roman style. The study of Vitruvius gave strong support to that pseudo-classic manner which, when it had reached its final point in Palladio's work, overspread the whole of Europe and dominated taste during two centuries. But the perfect plastic art of Italy, the pure art of the Cinque Cento, the painting of Raphael, Da Vinci, Titian and Correggio, the sculpture of Donatello, Michelangelo and Sansovino, the architecture of Bramante, Omodeo and the Venetian Lombardi, however much imbued with the spirit of the classical revival, takes rank beside the poetry of Ariosto as a free intelligent product of the Renaissance. That is to say, it is not so much an outcome of studies in antiquity as an exhibition of emancipated modern genius fired and illuminated by the masterpieces of the past. It indicates a separation from the middle ages, inasmuch as it is permanently natural. Its religion is joyous, sensuous, dramatic, terrible, but in each and all of its many-sided manifestations strictly human. Its touch on classical mythology is original, rarely imitative or pedantic. The art of the Renaissance was an apocalypse of the beauty of the world and man in unaffected spontaneity, without side thoughts for piety or erudition, inspired by pure delight in loveliness and harmony for their own sakes.
In the fields of science and philosophy humanism wrought similar important changes. Petrarch began by waging relentless war against the logicians and materialists of his own day. Science With the advance made in Greek studies scholastic methods of thinking fell into contemptuous oblivion. The newly soppy. aroused curiosity for nature encouraged men'like Alberti, Da Vinci, Toscanelli and Da Porta to make practical experiments, penetrate the working of physical forces, and invent scientific instruments. Anatomy began to be studied, and the time was not far distant when Titian should lend his pencil to the epoch-making treatise of Vesalius. The middle ages had been satisfied with absurd and visionary notions about the world around them, while the body of man was regarded with too much suspicion to be studied. Now the right method of interrogating nature with patience and loving admiration was instituted. At the same time the texts of ancient authors supplied hints which led to discoveries so far-reaching in their results as those of Copernicus, Columbus and Galileo. In philosophy, properly so called, the humanistic scorn for medieval dullness and obscurity swept away theological metaphysics as valueless. But at first little beyond empty rhetoric and clumsy compilation was substituted. The ethical treatises of the scholars are deficient in substance, while Ficino's attempt to revive Platonism betrays an uncritical conception of his master's drift. It was something, however, to have shaken off the shackles of ecclesiastical authority; and, even if a new authority, that of the ancients, was accepted in its stead, still progress was being made toward sounder methods of analysis. This is noticeable in Pomponazzo's system of materialism, based on the interpretation of Aristotle, but revealing a virile spirit of disinterested and unprejudiced research. The thinkers of southern Italy, Telesio, Bruno and Campanella, at last opened the two chief lines on which modern speculation has since moved. Telesio and Campanella may be termed the predecessors of Bacon. Bruno was the precursor of the idealistic schools. All three alike strove to disengage their minds from classical as well as ecclesiastical authority, proving that the emancipation of the will had been accomplished. It must be added that their writings, like every other product of the Renaissance, except its purest poetry and art, exhibit a hybrid between medieval and modern tendencies. Childish ineptitudes are mingled with intuitions of maturest wisdom, and seeds of future thought germinate in the decaying refuse of past systems.
Humanism in its earliest stages was uncritical. It absorbed the relics of antiquity with omnivorous appetite, and with very imperfect sense of the distinction between worse and better Criticism. work. Yet it led in process of time to criticism. The critique of literature began in the lecture-room of Politian, in the printing-house of Aldus, and in the school of Vittorino. The critique of Roman law started, under Politian's auspices, upon a more liberal course than that which had been followed by the powerful but narrow-sighted glossators of Bologna. Finally, in the court of Naples arose that most formidable of all critical engines, the critique of established ecclesiastical traditions and spurious historical documents. Valla by one vigorous effort destroyed the False Decretals and exposed the Donation of Constantine to ridicule, paving the way for the polemic carried on against the dubious pretensions of the papal throne by scholars of the Reformation. A similar criticism, conducted less on lines of erudition than of persiflage and irony, ransacked the moral abuses of the church and played around the very foundations of Christianity. This was tolerated with approval by men who repeated Leo X.'s witty epigram: "What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us !" The same critical and philosophic spirit working on the materials of history produced a new science, the honours of which belong to Machiavelli. He showed, on the one side, how the history of a people can be written with a recognition of fixed principles, and at the same time with an artistic feeling for personal and dramatic episodes. On the other side, he addressed himself to the analysis of man considered as a political being, to the anatomy of constitutions and the classification of governments, to the study of motives underlying public action, the secrets of success and the causes of failure in the conduct of affairs. The unscrupulous rigour with which he applied his scientific method, and the sinister deductions he thought himself justified in drawing from the results it yielded, excited terror and repulsion. Nevertheless, a department had been added to the intellectual empire of mankind, in which fellow-workers, like Guicciardini at Florence, and subsequently Sarpi at Venice, were not slow to follow the path traced by Machiavelli.
The object of the foregoing paragraphs has been to show in what way the positive, inquisitive, secular, exploratory spirit of the Renaissance, when toned and controlled by humanism, penetrated the regions of literature, art, philosophy and science. It becomes at this point of much moment to consider how social manners in Italy were modified by the same causes, since the type developed there was in large measure communicated together with the new culture to the rest of Europe. The first subject to be noticed under this heading is education. What has come to be called a classical education was the immediate product of the Italian Renaissance. The universities of Bologna, Padua and Salerno had been famous through the middle ages for the study of law, physics and medicine; and during the 15th and 16th centuries the first two still enjoyed celebrity in these faculties. But at this period no lecture-rooms were so crowded as those in which professors of antique literature and language read passages from the poets and orators, taught Greek, and commented upon the systems of philosophers. The medieval curriculum offered no defined place for the new learning of the Revival, which had indeed no recognized name. Chairs had therefore to be founded under the title of rhetoric, from which men like Chrysoloras and Guarino, Filelfo and Politian expounded orally to hundreds of eager students from every town of Italy and every nation in Europe their accumulated knowledge of antiquity. One mass of Greek and Roman erudition, including history and metaphysics, law and science, civic institutions and the art of war, mythology and magistracies, metrical systems and oratory, agriculture and astronomy, domestic manners and religious rites, grammar and philology, biography and numismatics, formed the miscellaneous subject-matter of this so-styled rhetoric. Notes taken at these lectures supplied young scholars with hints for further exploration; and a certain tradition of treating antique authors for the display of general learning, as well as for the elucidation of their texts, came into vogue, which has determined the method of scholarship for the last three centuries in Europe. The lack of printed books in the first period of the Revival, and the comparative rarity of Greek erudition among students, combined with the intense enthusiasm aroused for the new gospel of the classics, gave special value to the personal teaching of these professors. They journeyed from city to city, attracted by promises of higher pay, and allured by ever-growing laurels of popular fame. Each large town established its public study, academy or university, similar institutions under varying designations, for the exposition of the literae humaniores. The humanists, or professors of that branch of knowledge, became a class of the highest dignity. They were found in the chanceries of the republics, in the papal curia, in the council chambers of princes, at the headquarters of condottieri, wherever business had to be transacted, speeches to be made and the work of secretaries to be performed. Furthermore, they undertook the charge of private education, opening schools which displaced the medieval system of instruction, and taking engagements as tutors in the families of despots, noblemen and wealthy merchants. The academy established by Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua under the protection of Gian Francesco Gonzaga for the training of pupils of both sexes, might be chosen as the type of this Italian method. His scholars, who were lodged in appropriate buildings, met daily to hear the master read and comment on the classics. They learned portions of the best authors by heart, exercised themselves in translation from one language to another, and practised composition in prose and verse. It was Vittorino's care to see that, while their memories were duly stored with words and facts, their judgment should be formed by critical analysis, attention to style, and comparison of the authors of a decadent age with those who were acknowledged classics. During the hours of recreation suitable physical exercises, as fencing, riding and gymnastics, were conducted under qualified trainers. From this sketch it will be seen how closely the educational system which came into England during the reigns of the Tudors, and which has prevailed until the present time, was modelled upon the Italian type. English youths who spend their time at Eton between athletic sports and Latin verses, and who take an Ireland with a first class in "Greats" at Oxford, are pursuing the same course of physical and mental discipline as the princes of Gonzaga or Montefeltro in the 15th century.
The humanists effected a deeply penetrating change in social manners. Through their influence as tutors, professors, orators and courtiers, society was permeated by a fresh ideal of culture. To be a gentleman in Italy meant at this epoch to be a man acquainted with the rudiments at least of scholarship, refined in diction, capable of corresponding or of speaking in choice phrases, open to the beauty of the arts, intelligently interested in archaeology, taking for his models of conduct the great men of antiquity rather than the saints of the church. He was also expected to prove himself an adept in physical exercises and in the courteous observances which survived from chivalry. The type is set before us by Castiglione in that book upon the courtier which went the round of Europe in the 16th century. It is further emphasized in a famous passage of the Orlando Innamorato where Boiardo compares the Italian ideal of an accomplished gentleman with the coarser type admired by nations of the north. To this point the awakened intelligence of the Renaissance, instructed by humanism, polished by the fine arts, expanding in genial conditions of diffused wealth, had brought the Italians at a period when the rest of Europe was comparatively barbarous.
This picture has undoubtedly .a darker side. Humanism, in its revolt against the middle ages, was, as we have seen already, mundane, pagan, irreligious, positive. The Renaissance can, after all, be regarded only as a period of transition in which much of the good of the past was sacrificed while some of the evil was retained, and neither the bad nor the. good of the future was brought clearly into fact. Beneath the surface of brilliant social culture lurked gross appetites and savage passions, unrestrained by medieval piety, untutored by modern experience. Italian society exhibited an almost unexampled spectacle of literary, artistic and courtly refinement crossed by brutalities of lust, treasons, poisonings, assassinations, violence. A succession of worldly pontiffs brought the church into flagrant discord with the principles of Christianity. Steeped in pagan learning, emulous of imitating the manners of the ancients, used to think and feel in harmony with Ovid and Theocritus, and at the same time rendered cynical by the corruption of papal Rome, the educated classes lost their grasp upon morality. Political honesty ceased almost to have a name in Italy. The Christian virtues were scorned by the foremost actors and the ablest thinkers of the time, while the antique virtues were themes for rhetoric rather than moving-springs of conduct. This is apparent to all students of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the profoundest analysts of their age, the bitterest satirists of its vices, but themselves infected with its incapacity for moral goodness. Not only were the Italians vitiated; but they had also become impotent for action and resistance. At the height of the Renaissance the five great powers in the peninsula formed a confederation of independent but mutually attractive and repellent states. Equilibrium was maintained by diplomacy, in which the humanists played a foremost part, casting a network of intrigue over the nation which helped in no small measure to stimulate intelligence and create a common medium of culture, but which accustomed statesmen to believe that everything could be achieved by wire-pulling. Wars were conducted on a showy system by means of mercenaries, who played a safe game in the field and developed a system of bloodless campaigns. Meanwhile the people grew up unused to arms. When Italy between the years 1494 and 1530 became the battlefield of French, German and Spanish forces, it was seen to what a point of helplessness the political, moral and social conditions of the Renaissance had brought the nation.
It was needful to study at some length the main phenomena of the Renaissance in Italy, because the history of that phase of evolution in the other Western races turns almost entirely upon points in which they either adhered of the to or diverged from the type established there. Speaking broadly, what France, Germany, Spain and England assimilated from Italy at this epoch was in the - first place the new learning, as it was then called. out This implied the new conception of human life, the new interest in the material universe, the new method of education, and the new manners, which we have seen to be inseparable from Italian humanism. Under these forms of intellectual enlightenment and polite culture the renascence of the human spirit had appeared in Italy, where it was more than elsewhere connected with the study of classical antiquity. But that audacious exploratory energy which formed the motive force of the Renaissance as distinguished from the Revival of Learning took, as we shall see, very different directions in the several nations who now were sending the flower of their youth to study at the feet of Italian rhetoricians.
The Renaissance ran its course in Italy with strange indifference to consequences. The five great powers, held in equilibrium by Lorenzo de' Medici, dreamed that the peninsula could be maintained in statu quo by diplomacy. The church saw no danger in encouraging a pseudo-pagan ideal of life, violating its own principle of existence by assuming the policy of an aggrandizing secular state, and outraging Christendom openly by its acts and utterances. Society at large was hardly aware that an intellectual force of stupendous magnitude and incalculable explosive power had been created by the new learning.
Why should not established institutions proceed upon the customary and convenient methods of routine, while the delights of existence were augmented, manners polished, arts developed, and a golden age of epicurean ease made decent by a state religion which no one cared to break with because no one was left to regard it seriously? This was the attitude of the Italians when the Renaissance, which they had initiated as a thing of beauty, began to operate as a thing of power beyond the Alps.
Germany was already provided with universities, seven of which had been founded between 1348 and 1409. In these haunts of learning the new studies took root after the year 1440, chiefly through the influence of travelling professors; Peter Luder and Samuel Karoch. German scholars made their way to Lombard and Tuscan lecture-rooms, bringing back in Ger- the methods of the humanists. Greek, Latin and Hebrew erudition soon found itself at home on Teutonic soil. Like Italian men of letters, these pioneers of humanism gave a classic turn to their patronymics; unfamiliar names, Crotus Rubeanus and Pierius Graecus, Capnion and Lupambulus Ganymedes, Oecolampadius and Melanchthon, resounded on the Rhine. A few of the German princes, among whom Maximilian, the prince cardinal Albert of Mainz, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, and Eberhard of Wurttemberg deserve mention, exercised a not insignificant influence on letters by the foundation of new universities and the patronage of learned men. The cities of Strassburg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basel, became centres of learned coteries, which gathered round scholars like Wimpheling, Brant, Peutinger, Schedel, and Pirckheimer, artists like Darer and Holbein, printers of the eminence of Froben. Academies in imitation of Italian institutions came into existence, the two most conspicuous, named after the Rhine and the Danube, holding their headquarters respectively at Heidelberg and Vienna. Crowned poets, of whom the most eminent was Conrad Celtes Protucius (Pickel!), emulated the fame of Politian and Pontano. Yet, though the Renaissance was thus widely communicated to the centres of German intelligence, it displayed a different character from that which it assumed in Italy. Gothic art, which was indigenous in Germany, yielded but little to southern influences. Such work as that of Diirer, Vischer, Cranach, Schlingauer, Holbein, consummate as it was in technical excellence, did not assume Italian forms of loveliness, did not display the paganism of the Latin races. The modification of Gothic architecture by pseudo-Roman elements of style was incomplete. What Germany afterwards took of the Palladian manner was destined to reach it on a circuitous route from France. In like manner the new learning failed to penetrate all classes of society with the rapidity of its expansion in Italy, nor was the new ideal of life and customs so easily substituted for the medieval. The German aristocracy, as Aeneas Sylvius had noticed, remained for the most part barbarous, addicted to gross pleasures, contemptuous of culture. The German dialects were too rough to receive that artistic elaboration under antique influences which had been so facile in Tuscany. The doctors of the universities were too wedded to their antiquated manuals and methods, too satisfied with dullness, too proud of titles and diplomas, too anxious to preserve ecclesiastical discipline and to repress mental activity, for a genial spirit of humanism to spread freely. Not in Cologne or Tubingen but in Padua and Florence did the German pioneers of the Renaissance acquire their sense of liberal studies. And when they returned home they found themselves encumbered with stupidities, jealousies and rancours. Moreover, the temper of these more enlightened men was itself opposed to Italian indifference and immorality; it was pugnacious and polemical, eager to beat down the arrogance of monks and theologians rather than to pursue an ideal of aesthetical self-culture. To a student of the origins of German humanism it is Tear that something very different from the Renaissance of Lorenzo
Medici and Leo X. was in preparation from the first upon Feutonic soil. Far less plastic and form-loving than the Italian, the German intelligence was more penetrative, earnest, disputative, occupied with substantial problems. Starting with theological criticism, proceeding to the stage of solid studies in the three learned languages, German humanism occupied the attention of a widely scattered sect of erudite scholars; but it did not arouse the interest of the whole nation until it was forced into a violently militant attitude by Pfefferkorn's attack on Reuchlin. That attempt to extinguish honest thought prepared the Reformation; and humanism after 1518 was absorbed in politico-religious warfare.
The point of contact between humanism and the Reformation in Germany has to be insisted on; for it is just here that the relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance in general makes itself apparent. As the Renaissance had its precursory movements in the medieval period, so the German Reformation was preceded by Wickliffe and Huss, by the discontents of the Great Schism and by the councils of Constance and Basel. These two main streams of modern progress had been proceeding upon different tracks to diverse issues, but they touched in the studies stimulated by the Revival, and they had a common origin in the struggle of the spirit after self-emancipation. Johann Reuchlin, who entered the lecture-room of Argyropoulos at Rome in 1482, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who once dwelt at Venice as the house guest of the Aldi, applied their critical knowledge of Hebrew and of Greek to the elucidation and diffusion of the Bible. To the Germans, as to all nations of that epoch, the Bible came as a new book, because they now read it for the first time with eyes opened by humanism. The touch of the new spirit which had evolved literature, art and culture in Italy sufficed in Germany to recreate Christianity. This new spirit in Italy emancipated human intelligence by the classics; in Germany it emancipated the human conscience by the Bible. The indignation excited by Leo X.'s sale of indulgences, the moral rage stirred in Northern hearts by papal abominations in Rome, were external causes which precipitated the schism between Teutonic and Latin Christianity. The Reformation, inspired by the same energy of resuscitated life as the Renaissance, assisted by the same engines of the printing-press and paper, using the same apparatus of scholarship, criticism, literary skill, being in truth another manifestation of the same world-movement under a diverse form, now posed itself as an irreconcilable antagonist to Renaissance Italy. It would be difficult to draw any comparison between German and Italian humanists to the disparagement of the former. Reuchlin was no less learned than Pico; Melanchthon no less humane than Ficino; Erasmus no less witty, and far more trenchant, than Petrarch; Ulrich von Hutten no less humorous than Folengo; Paracelsus no less fantastically learned than Cardano. But the cause in which German intellect and will were enlisted was so different that it is difficult not to make a formal separation between that movement which evolved culture in Italy and that which restored religion in Germany, establishing the freedom of intelligence in the one sphere and the freedom of the conscience in the other. The truth is that the Reformation was the Teutonic Renaissance. It was the emancipation of the reason on a line neglected by the Italians, more important indeed in its political consequences, more w
These files are public domain.
Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'The Renaissance'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/t/the-renaissance.html. 1910.
