Book: A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

C >> Carlton J. H. Hayes >> A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.




FOR THE OUTCOME OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLT AND THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION
FROM THE THEOLOGICAL STANDPOINT, see Adolph Harnack, _History of
Dogma_, Eng. trans., Vol. VII (1900). Charles Beard, _The Reformation
of the Sixteenth Century in its Relation to Modern Thought and
Knowledge_ (1883) is a strongly Protestant estimate of the significance
of the whole movement. J. Balmes, _European Civilization: Protestantism
and Catholicity Compared in their Effects on the Civilization of
Europe_ (1850), though old, is a suggestive resume from the Catholic
standpoint.




CHAPTER V

THE CULTURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY


[Sidenote: "Culture"]

"Culture" is a word generally used to denote learning and refinement in
manners and art. The development of culture--the acquisition of new
knowledge and the creation of beautiful things--is ordinarily the work
of a comparatively small number of scientists and artists. Now if in
any particular period or among any special people, we find a relatively
larger group of intellectual leaders who succeed in establishing an
important educated class and in making permanent contributions to the
civilization of posterity, then we say that it is a cultured century or
a cultured nation.

[Sidenote: Greek Culture]

All races and all generations have had some kind of culture, but within
the recorded history of humanity, certain peoples and certain centuries
stand out most distinctly as influencing its evolution. Thus, the
Greeks of the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ gathered
together and handed down to us all manner of speculation about the
nature of the universe, all manner of hypothetical answers to the
eternal questions--Whence do we come, What are we doing, Where do we
go?--and this was the foundation of modern philosophy and metaphysics.
From the same Greeks came our geometry and the rudiments of our
sciences of astronomy and medicine. It was they who gave us the model
for nearly every form of literature--dramatic, epic, and lyric poetry,
dialogues, oratory, history--and in their well-proportioned temples, in
their balanced columns and elaborate friezes, in their marble
chiselings of the perfect human form, they fashioned for us forever the
classical expression of art.

[Sidenote: Roman Culture]

Still in ancient times, the Romans developed classical architecture in
the great triumphal arches and in the high-domed public buildings which
strewed their empire. They adapted the fine forms of Greek literature
to their own more pompous, but less subtle, Latin language. They
devised a code of law and a legal system which made them in a real
sense the teachers of order and the founders of the modern study of
law.

[Sidenote: Mohammedan Culture]

The Mohammedans, too, at the very time when the Christians of western
Europe were neglecting much of the ancient heritage, kept alive the
traditions of Greek philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.
From eastern Asia they borrowed algebra, the Arabic numerals, and the
compass, and, in their own great cities of Bagdad, Damascus, and
Cordova, they themselves developed the curiously woven curtains and
rugs, the strangely wrought blades and metallic ornaments, the
luxurious dwellings and graceful minarets which distinguish Arabic or
Mohammedan art.

[Sidenote: Medieval Culture]

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--the height of the middle ages
--came a wonderful outburst of intellectual and artistic activity.
Under the immediate auspices of the Catholic Church it brought forth
abundantly a peculiarly Christian culture. Renewed acquaintance with
Greek philosophy, especially with that of Aristotle, was joined with a
lively religious faith to produce the so called scholastic philosophy
and theology. Great institutions of higher learning--the universities--
were now founded, in which centered the revived study not only of
philosophy but of law and medicine as well, and over which appeared the
first cloud-wrapped dawn of modern experimental science. And side by
side with the sonorous Latin tongue, which long continued to be used by
scholars, were formed the vernacular languages--German, English,
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.--that gave a wealth of
variety to reviving popular literature. Majestic cathedrals with
pointed arch and flying buttress, with lofty spire and delicate
tracery, wonderful wood carvings, illuminated manuscripts, quaint
gargoyles, myriad statues of saints and martyrs, delicately colored
paintings of surpassing beauty--all betokened the great Christian, or
Gothic, art of the middle ages.

[Sidenote: New Elements in Culture of Sixteenth Century]

The educated person of the sixteenth century was heir to all these
cultural periods: intellectually and artistically he was descended from
Greeks, Romans, Mohammedans, and his medieval Christian forbears. But
the sixteenth century itself added cultural contributions to the
original store, which help to explain not only the social, political,
and ecclesiastical activities of that time but also many of our
present-day actions and ideas. The essentially new factors in
sixteenth-century culture may be reckoned as (1) the diffusion of
knowledge as a result of the invention of printing; (2) the development
of literary criticism by means of humanism; (3) a golden age of
painting and architecture; (4) the flowering of national literature;
(5) the beginnings of modern natural science.


THE INVENTION OF PRINTING

The present day is notably distinguished by the prevalence of enormous
numbers of printed books, periodicals, and newspapers. Yet this very
printing, which seems so commonplace to us now, has had, in all, but a
comparatively brief existence. From the earliest recorded history up to
less than five hundred years ago every book in Europe [Footnote: For an
account of early printing in China, Japan, and Korea, see the informing
article "Typography" in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 11th
edition, Vol. XXVII, p. 510.] was laboriously written by hand,
[Footnote: It is interesting to note the meaning of our present word
"manuscript," which is derived from the Latin--_manu scriptum_
("written by hand").] and, although copyists acquired an astonishing
swiftness in reproducing books, libraries of any size were the property
exclusively of rich institutions or wealthy individuals. It was at the
beginning of modern times that the invention of printing revolutionized
intellectual history.

Printing is an extremely complicated process, and it is small wonder
that centuries of human progress elapsed before its invention was
complete. Among the most essential elements of the perfected process
are _movable type_ with which the impression is made, and
_paper_, on which it is made. A few facts may be conveniently
culled from the long involved story of the development of each of these
elements.

[Sidenote: Development of paper]

For their manuscripts the Greeks and Romans had used papyrus, the
prepared fiber of a tough reed which grew in the valley of the Nile
River. This papyrus was very expensive and heavy, and not at all
suitable for printing. Parchment, the dressed skins of certain animals,
especially sheep, which became the standard material for the hand-
written documents of the middle ages, was extremely durable, but like
papyrus, it was costly, unwieldy, and ill adapted for printing.

The forerunner of modern European paper was probably that which the
Chinese made from silk as early as the second century before Christ.
For silk the Mohammedans at Mecca and Damascus in the middle of the
eighth century appear to have substituted cotton, and this so-called
Damascus paper was later imported into Greece and southern Italy and
into Spain. In the latter country the native-grown hemp and flax were
again substituted for cotton, and the resulting linen paper was used
considerably in Castile in the thirteenth century and thence penetrated
across the Pyrenees into France and gradually all over western and
central Europe. Parchment, however, for a long time kept its
preeminence over silk, cotton, or linen paper, because of its greater
firmness and durability, and notaries were long forbidden to use any
other substance in their official writings. Not until the second half
of the fifteenth century was assured the triumph of modern paper,
[Footnote: The word "paper" is derived from the ancient "papyrus."] as
distinct from papyrus or parchment, when printing, then on the
threshold of its career, demanded a substance of moderate price that
would easily receive the impression of movable type.

[Sidenote: Development of Movable Type]

The idea of movable type was derived from an older practice of carving
reverse letters or even whole inscriptions upon blocks of wood so that
when they were inked and applied to writing material they would leave a
clear impression. Medieval kings and princes frequently had their
signatures cut on these blocks of wood or metal, in order to impress
them on charters, and a kind of engraving was employed to reproduce
pictures or written pages as early as the twelfth century.

It was a natural but slow evolution from block-impressing to the
practice of casting individual letters in separate little pieces of
metal, all of the same height and thickness, and then arranging them in
any desired sequence for printing. The great advantage of movable type
over the blocks was the infinite variety of work which could be done by
simply setting and resetting the type.

The actual history of the transition from the use of blocks to movable
type--the real invention of modern printing--is shrouded in a good deal
of mystery and dispute. It now appears likely that by the year 1450, an
obscure Lourens Coster of the Dutch town of Haarlem had devised movable
type, that Coster's invention was being utilized by a certain Johan

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