In 1400, West and Central Europe, though politically fragmented from one point of view, can also be seen as an empire, the empire of the Catholic Church, based in Rome (mostly) and ruled by the pope and his cardinals.
 
What made the church an empire?  Much of the land of Europe was dedicated to religious purposes, and the pope and his court were acknowledged as the ultimate authority over it.  The pope had vast if sometimes contested powers of patronage and taxation.

The origins of this church empire went back to the 11th century, when the clergy began to fight to keep church property from being plundered by competing rulers.  In the name of the church's spiritual purpose, the pope took control of church property and appointments from the kings and dukes who had controlled most of it before.

Clerical  control of church property under the Papacy's supervision made possible centralized control of belief, and the organized repression of heresy within the church.  It made possible international military expeditions against unbelievers abroad.  It made possible great cultural and intellectual achievements -- the building of great cathedrals, the founding of universities, and more.

In the 15th century, however, the church empire was in trouble.  A more educated and sophisticated laity saw the clergy ass
idle, corrupt, and bloated with wealth.  The church was disgracefully political, in the worst sense of the term, something that was made painfully obvious by its 15th c. civil war -- the Great Schism, during which the West had two and even three popes for decades.   Even clerical reformers often looked to the "secular powers" to clean up the mess in Rome, or at least to keep Rome from bleeding local churches and local communities of their money.

This of course is the background to the Reformation; but it is not irrelevant to the Renaissance, which was an intellectual reaction to the intellectual domination of the same church empire.

Italian Renaissance men said they were rejecting the ignorance of a dark and superstitious era.  But we should not accept their view of the medieval tradition.  The High Middle Ages was actually a very creative period in intellectual history.  The center of such activities was the universities, which were church institutions, and all the scholastics -- schoolmen -- were clerics.

It was this scholastic tradition that Renaissance thinkers revolted against.  Medieval intellectual life was was not vacuous, or simply stupid.  Like the institutional church, it was, vast, complex, sophisticated, and heavy.  Renaissance men were not filling a void, they were rejecting a vast edifice that was too big and complex to command their sympathy.
 
Why did they react this way to the medieval tradition?  The most important was the kind of men that the Renaissance thinkers were.

•      First, they were laymen, the most sophisticated of laymen.  They of course shared in the self-assertive attitude common in 15th c. Europe.
•      Second, they were citizens in the richest and most intensely political communities of their time, the Italian city-states.  An Italian citizen was the farthest thing from a monk conceivable.  The monk, the perfect cleric, withdrew as far as possible from the unavoidably sinful life of the world.  He was a citizen of heaven in exile.  The good citizen of Florence identified strongly with his earthly home, was proud of it, was willing to work for it.
•      Third, Renaissance thinkers were Italians.  They were neighbors of the papacy.  If people in the 15th century were disillusioned about Rome, no one was more so than those who were constantly exposed to the sordid machinations of the papal court.

When they read the ancient thinkers -- Plato, Cicero, Aristotle in new translations -- what did they find?

•      They found men who were, like themselves, citizens of flourishing and intensely political towns.
•      They found men who were wise without being either clerics or what we would call academics, institutionalized intellectuals, men who were also inspiring writers, not dull logicians.
•      They found men who were cultivated and worldly, who did not shrink from public action.
•      And they found, in the writings of the ancient Romans, an era  when   Italy led the world!

I have been talking about philosophy and intellectual life, but if I had been describing the arts the story would be much the same.

Renaissance means rebirth, but in the case of the Italians of the 14th and 15th centuries we do them an injustice if we take the term literally.  It was a new birth, one that had been gestating for a long time, based as it was on the political and economic achievments of the Italian Middle Ages. But to give their own ideas a respectable history, they were playing one set of authorities, the ancients, off against another set, the medievals, in order to assert their own autonomy.  Renaissance men
declared their independence of stale tradition by going back to an older one.

But the Renaissance revolt, the appeal to ancient culture for inspiration and the justification of innovation, was not the only revolt against the stale medieval tradition.  Others appealed directly over the church's head to Scripture and the early church.

John Wyclif (to take an early example from late 14th century England) represents the rejection of the clerical establishment by clerics.  Wyclif, like other rebels of the sort, was an intellectual, a doctor of theology, in his case a professor of theology at Oxford. If anything, Wyclif was more disgusted with the state of the church than the Renaissance men.  He saw the exercise of papal power as one great system of abuse.   A reform of the church, a reform that would bring it back to its biblical purity, was what was needed.
 
 Wyclif taught that it was the duty of secular princes to do what the pope and his deputies would never do:  strip the church of its excess wealth and power, and replace corrupt and useless ministers with preachers who would give God's word to the people straight.
 
For a while, Wyclif circulated in the highest circles of government; his patron was the king's uncle.  But he did not succeed in getting his ideas implemented.  Wyclif soon stopped talking about church property and began attacking the church's sacraments, and this made his patron nervous.  Then, when high taxes set off a great peasant's revolt in England, a revolt aimed at
lay lords as well as the church, Wyclif's radicalism began to look dangerous to all property.  He was dropped like a hot potato and his books burnt, though he was allowed an honorable retirement.  The time was not right for a break with Rome, or the dethronement of the clergy.
 
Two ideas of revolt, two types of discontent with the medieval clerical establishment.  One set of rebels asserted the dignity of the layman's life in the world by referring to pagan classics; another said the life of a layman was as virtuous as any cleric's, and that laymen should have access to the word of God.  These ideas were the two most important to arise in the later Middle Ages.  We will spend much of the course following them, watching them work themselves out.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.