Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, The
John Hale
Number of quotes: 31
Book ID: 202 Page: 66/67
Section: 3A1
In a popular school geography textbook of 1542, the Cosmographic Rudiments of Johann Honter, many times republished until the end of the century, the maps showed rivers, mountains and major cities but no borders, and the place-names – all in Latin – reflect the provinces of the Roman and medieval worlds rather than a contemporary political survey.
Quote ID: 4617
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 68
Section: 5D
The sentiment of nationhood was slow to evolve because it only rang true within a country as a whole at exceptional moments of danger from outside threats. Even then, as we shall see, rallying calls from the centre faded to whispers and eventually to silence as they slowly passed along unmade roads into regions with their own forms of speech and patterns of local loyalties.The word ‘nation’ itself was hardly ever used before the seventeenth century to refer to all the inhabitants of a country.
Quote ID: 4618
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 113
Section: 3A1
Before Protestantism challenged a fairly relaxed, because monopolistic, Catholicism…….
Abbots could summon tenants to defend their property rights in arms. Rome was a salon for worldly cardinals and a marketplace of international diplomacy as well as a magnet for pilgrims; it was Caput Mundi, head of the world, for its admirers, Coda Mundi, the world’s anus, for those who deplored the mercenariness of its clergy and the number of its prostitutes. All these historically induced anomalies and opinions were taken by most in their stride.
Quote ID: 4619
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 114
Section: 3A2
Earlier waves of heretical protest against Catholicism, its priesthood, its practices and some of its doctrines, had by the mid-fifteenth century been subdued or banished to remote places by church and state acting in concerted repression.
Quote ID: 4620
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 117
Section: 2A6
To Luther, as to many of his less passionately radical contemporaries, a reconsideration of Christian belief through concentrating on the words and lives of Christ and those who wrote and spread the gospel close to his lifetime, led them to doubt what amounted to commentaries and inventions. Apart from the gospels’ baptism and communion, the subsequently evolved sacramental apparatus – confirmation, marriage (as a sacrament as opposed to a contract) confession and penance, extreme unction, ordination – fell away, and with it the need for the miracle-aiding caste of priests that had kept it in place.
Quote ID: 4621
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 118
Section: 2A2
…whereas Luther maintained a half-way position on the nature of the Eucharist, denying the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the real body and blood of Christ while accepting their actual spiritual presence, Zwingli denied any change in their nature; they were simply to be eaten and drunk as commemorative symbols of what Christ had, before his death, offered to all mankind then and for ever.
Quote ID: 4622
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 119/120
Section: 3A2A
In the eyes of governments, Anabaptists who openly voiced or acted on this opinion were traitors, to be executed as such. And they were sharply criticized by the major reform movements, all of which relied on as much co-operation with the civil authorities as they could.The religious event that most clearly revealed the coming of age of Protestant doctrine as an orthodoxy, however, was the public burning in 1553 of the Spanish theological writer Michael Servetus in Geneva, at Calvin’s urging, for a crime that was formerly a Catholic monopoly: heresy.
Quote ID: 4623
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 126
Section: 3A2A,3A4C
Religion was a potent exacerbator of civil war in later sixteenth-century France, as from 1642 in England, and of military action elsewhere. In 1546 Charles V explained to his sister Mary why he intended to go to war against the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League. ‘If we failed to intervene now’, he wrote, ‘all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith . . . I decided to embark on war against Hesse and Saxony as transgressors of the peace against the Duke of Brunswick and his territory. . . although this pretext will not long disguise the fact that it is a matter of religion.’
Quote ID: 4625
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 198/200
Section: 4A
‘Surely the first place is due to holy scripture’, wrote Erasmus in his widely read dialogue The Religious Banquet, ‘but sometimes I find some things said or written by the ancients, by pagans and poets, so chaste, so holy, so divine, that I am persuaded a good genius enlightened them. Certainly there are many in the communion of saints who are not in our catalogue of saints.’{18}….
Calvin was shaped by and endorsed humanistic studies and also – as long as the texts were carefully chosen and the teaching of them vigilant – the classics-based school curricula that were becoming standard in Europe for the preparation of ministers as well as merchants, courtiers and lawyers.
Quote ID: 4626
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 200
Section: 2E1
When the great Vatican obelisk, originally erected in Alexandria by the quasi-divine Emperor Augustus, was laboriously winched upright in front of St Peter’s in Rome in 1586, Pope Sixtus V thought putting a fragment of the true cross on top would suffice to exorcise its pagan significance.
Quote ID: 4627
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 202 Page: 200
Section: 3H
Coming towards the educated public from so many directions, it is not surprising that antiquity became fashionable. Over baptismal fonts clergymen resignedly intoned such ‘Christian’ names as Julius Caesar, Camillus, Aeneas, Hector, Achilles, Flavia, Livia.
Quote ID: 4628
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 202 Page: 276/277
Section: 2A4
Drama itself had always relied more than any other literary form on money. The enormously popular passion enactments and miracle cycles of the later middle ages, sometimes lasting as much as a week or more, played all over Europe in open fields or streets and market squares to audiences of up to twenty thousand. Part drama, part religious ceremony (attendance at some plays qualified the spectator to an indulgence, a remission of years in purgatory similar to those available at pilgrimage churches) and part fair....
Quote ID: 4629
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 355
Section: 4B
In March, 1772, Boswell called on Dr Johnson as he was preparing the fourth edition of his great Dictionary. Fertile as usual with bright, up-to-date ideas, Boswell suggested the inclusion of the work ‘civilization’. This, he thought, would be a useful general term to oppose ‘barbarity’ because ‘civility’ was more socially narrow. The lexicographer would have none of it; ‘he would not admit civilization, but only civility.’{1} To civilize, in the sense of extending the values of civility to those not irredeemably barbarous, was acceptable as a verb, but the process had not gone so far that civilization could be used of society as a whole.
Quote ID: 4630
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 358
Section: 4B
As Cicero became the most read of all the authors of antiquity, especially after the discovery of a complete text of his On the Orator in 1421, it was increasingly clearly realized that everything he was revered for, whether as a moral philosopher or master rhetorician, took active civic life for granted. Moral philosophy for the Romans represented the art of observing the highest ethical standards while living usefully and enjoyably within a large community.
Quote ID: 4631
Time Periods: 047
Book ID: 202 Page: 362
Section: 4B
And to see how instinctive the classical division between civilized and barbarian, brutish men became, we can look at the way in which Christian Europe’s own Amerindians, the Irish and the Russians, were described. George Turberville, who knew Ireland well, linked both in a poem of 1568. The Irish had been famous for their contribution to the early fortunes of Christianity in the British Isles, but now the poet remarks that he had never seen a people so beset with saints, yet all but vile and vain:Wild Irish are as civil as the Russies in their kind:
Hard choice which is the best of both, each bloody,
rude and blind.
Quote ID: 4632
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 363
Section: 4B
…Sir John Davies, a man who knew the country and strove to be fair-minded, found himself exasperatedly referring to Irishmen’s ‘contempt and scorn of all things necessary for the civil life of man . . . I dare say boldly that never any person did build any brick or stone house for his private habitation . . . Neither did any of them in all this time plant any gardens or orchards, enclose or improve their lands, live together in settled villages or towns’.{22}Pastor John’s Note: Irish
Quote ID: 4633
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 368
Section: 4B
Men in many walks of life sought and acquired distinction. But the norms themselves did not encourage individualism. Civility had been hard won, was protective of the status it had acquired, satisfied that it had regained the ground lost by Greece and Rome to the barbarians, and determined to keep it. Its most cherished values favoured conformity.….
The passage in which Tacitus described the civilizing of the Britons went on with a warning: ‘and, little by little, men drifted towards the pleasures of vice: porticoes, baths, elegant banquets. Among the naïve, this was known as “civilization”; it was nothing but a form of servitude.’
Quote ID: 4634
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 202 Page: 372
Section: 4B
Of the transatlantic voyages, Busbecq remarked, ‘religion supplies the pretext and gold the motive.’{49}
Quote ID: 4635
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 399/400
Section: 4B
In England, those accused of crimes were entitled to plead ‘benefit of clergy’ in order to gain access to a lighter sentencing procedure for a wide variety of offences. It involved passing a basic literacy test: the ability to sign with a name rather than a cross and to puzzle through a line or two of scripture. Originating as a palliative to governmental claims to bring the clergy within a uniform secular legal system, its continuance after the Reformation owed something to a growing distrust of the illiterate masses. It was certainly an incentive to gain at least a veneer of education. Of two thieves who burgled the Earl of Sussex’s house in 1613 one was hanged, the other, who passed the test, was merely branded on the thumb.
Quote ID: 4636
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 426
Section: 3A2
Popes and Protestant preachers endorsed violent punishments for those they pronounced to be slaves to erroneous beliefs and commended or fulminated against wars in accordance to what they judged their rightfulness to be. Secular authority itself, guardian of civility’s values, was not innocent; ‘considering its origin carefully’, Francesco Guicciardini wrote in about 1525, ‘all political power is rooted in violence.’{17}
Quote ID: 4637
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 444
Section: 2A3,2E1
Relics, too, had this power to comfort, not so much the more esoteric ones which strained even unsophisticated belief, like the Virgin’s nightgown in Aachen or the water in which she had washed Jesus’s baby clothes in Cairo, or his foreskin, cut off at his circumcision (Calvin, not a widely travelled man, had seen three of them), but bits of bone and fingernail and hair that passed the current of hope directly between worshipper and protector…
Quote ID: 4638
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 448
Section: 3A2A
Between 1587 and 1593 three hundred and sixty-eight persons were burned as witches in and around Toulouse. In 1611 and 1612 two hundred and sixty witches were killed in the small south German town of Ellwangen.
Quote ID: 4639
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 448/449
Section: 3A2A
Other manifestations of popular nervous instability were treated as the political revolts they sometimes, if unintentionally, became. ‘In the year of our Lord 1476’, a Bavarian chronicler reported, there came to the village of Niklashausen a cowherd and drum player. . . . The whole country, he said, was mired in sin and wantonness, and unless our people were ready to do penance and change their wicked ways, God would let all Germany go to destruction. This vision, hesaid, was revealed to him by the Virgin Mary.
. . . .
The drummer preached against sinfully extravagant clothing and ‘many men and women took off all their clothes and left them in the church, going away naked except for their shifts.’ He also ‘preached violently against the government and the clergy . . . so vehemently against the priests that the pilgrims of Niklashausen made up a special song which they chanted along with their other hymns. It went:
O God in Heaven, on you we call,
Kyrie eleison,
Help us seize our priests and kill them all,
Kyrie eleison.
Getting to hear of this, the bishop of nearby Wurzburg, who was also the chief political authority in the city, sent out troops. Many peasants were killed and captured.
Quote ID: 4640
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 462
Section: 2A2,3A2A
The result both of Protestant zeal and reactive Catholic rigour was to increase the awareness of sinfulness among the sensitive of both faiths. For fear of contamination and to parade their own orthodoxy, neighbours turned informer to an increasingly over-worked Inquisition.….
Another Italian, a shoemaker, was reported to have pronounced that the sacramental wafer was just ‘a bit of food which one puts in one’s mouth and comes out of one’s arse’.{76} Such remarks were no longer safe within the formerly harmless context of goading the straitlaced or making a risque joke.
….
Even within the doctrinally reasonably easy-going Elizabethan form of Protestantism (which nonetheless killed Catholic missionary priests like Edmund Campion when it could locate them), a rigidity developed which showed as little mercy towards weak friends as towards professional ideological foes.
Quote ID: 4641
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 464
Section: 4B
A stealthy rise in population; a more obvious gap between prices and wages; a not always welcome challenge to spiritual self-confidence: these offered fertile ground for agitation.….
Fear of insurrection was a steadily nagging irritant within the lives of those with power or property to lose.
Quote ID: 4642
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 471
Section: 4B
Higher prices, increased taxes: these were perceived as the dominant indicators of social unfairness. Even when the cause of a revolt was ostensibly religious, as during the riots in the southern Low Countries in 1579, a deeper aim was discerned: ‘to seize the wealth of the rich’.{15}
Quote ID: 4643
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 471
Section: 3A2
On the whole, however, the religious reform movements seconded governments’ concern with the obedience of subjects.….
By the 1559 Elizabethan Act of Uniformity, church attendance on Sundays and the Holy Days selected by government was made compulsory. In 1583 the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, emphasized the importance of there being ‘a settled order in doctrine and discipline’ to avoid ‘disobedience to the Queen and law’.{17}
Quote ID: 4644
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 471
Section: 3A2
In both Protestant and Catholic countries, pulpit exhortations had never been so open to prompting by the state. Both had long seen the church courts’ punishments for sin and the secular courts’ penalties for crime as symbiotic partners in the defence against the errant aspects of human nature. From the mid-sixteenth century this co-operation became closer than ever.
Quote ID: 4645
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 478/479
Section: 3A2
Help was at hand here from the higher moral standards demanded by Reform. In both Catholic and Protestant countries the old structure of church courts and clerical parish visitations was revitalized. ‘For what’, Calvin asked, ‘will be the consequence if every man be at liberty to follow his own inclinations? But such would be the case, unless the preaching of the doctrine were accompanied with private admonitions, reproofs, and other means to enforce the doctrine.’{26} And because most sins (covetousness, envy, theft, sexual licence, blasphemy – which implied disrespect for authority – murder) had social connotations, magistrates co-operated with Catholic priests and Protestant ministers.
Quote ID: 4646
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 483
Section: 4B
Though medieval institutionalized charity – doles at monastery doors, homes for orphans and foundlings, almshouses for the decrepit, hospices for the sick – had responded to a mixture of protective love and society’s preference for tucking its casualties out of sight, the more common form was those individual ‘good works’, hand-outs at street corners, church doors or after weddings or funerals, that Reformers decried as useless bribes to obtain grace. Catholics saw the poor as an opportunity to display their charity: ‘the poor are on the cross of adversity’, ran a characteristic utterance of 1531, ‘as much for the salvation of those that aid them charitably as for their own salvation.’{33}
Quote ID: 4647
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 202 Page: 504
Section: 4B
In Domenico Romoli’s The Steward of 1560, the noisy, messy, unplanned and unthoughtfully prepared medieval feast has become civilized. There are forks as well as knives, guests no longer use their hands. There are table-cloths, sometimes changed between courses, and napkins. One course is cleared before another is provided. Servants are deft, quiet and carefully rehearsed. As with the design and contents of the garden outside, the meal indoors reflected the chastening influence of civility.….
The days of adventitious sharing in the noise and warmth within an open palace door and a hand-out of the leavings were over; the populace was firmly excluded from the pleasures of the rich.
Quote ID: 4648
Time Periods: 7
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