Myths of the Renaissance
I've read a thought provoking and witty essay by Australian structuralist philosopher James Franklin. The crux of the issue is the Renaissance, and how much later sensibilities have made these ages into myth; this is naturally part of the whole scholarship that has been produced to debunk Medieval myths, some of which quoted on related pages are "The Myth of the Droit de Cussage", by Alain Boureau (shattering apart the old Braveheart riddle about "Primae Nocte") and the "Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection", which tears apart the also old belief that human dissection was forbidden in the Middle Ages, both of which I plan to own in the future.
Anyway, back at the Renaissance theme, this essay attacks the old, and nowadays only found among dry resumés and schoolbooks, notion that the Renaissance was somehow an age that ushered Europe "away" from the Dark Ages and into an age of prosperity, bliss and intellectual wisdom. There is nothing new, indeed, in this, and so far most respectable historiography of the present avoids painting much of a terrible and caricature-esque view of the Middle Ages, even if it does not set to actively combat the popular wisdom and the tired old notions still widely in vogue in popular mentality and schoolbooks.
What it does is to go further on the issue of the "Renaissance" fable, and attacks its intellectual creativity altogether vis-à-vis the preceding period, making elucidations on the previous literary and scientific achievements of Medieval scholarship in the meantime. The attacks are particularly devastating: the "Renaissance" as set early on is defined merely as a sycophantic attitude towards earlier Roman authors. In the last paragraphs, the author goes so far as to attack Petrarch, the man-myth considered as the forebear of the "re-birth" of Classical art and the term "Dark Ages" (whereas "Middle" Ages is derived from XVII century academia; more on this below).
I would like to know from our expert Medievalists and historians (Side glances to Siggy aside), how much merit has this thesis. It is quite obvious that much of the old, Gibbon, schoolbook like definition of periods of "darkness" and "light" is posh, but Franklin takes a rather radical stance on knowledge of the XV century. Yes, it is indeed true that Petrarch and the subsequent merely imported a Medieval theological view of history into their Classicist framework - the "Age of the Father, Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost" into "Ancient-Medieval-Modern" respectively, but is the statement that the XV century intellectual life is rather devoid of originality and value compared to the preceding, and later centuries, completely true?
Some excerpts for you interested:
The literary end of intellectual life did not fare much better than science, except that the slump was not quite so long. Rather than protest, as is usual, about the difficulty of confining historical movements within definite dates, I am happy to name the fifteenth century as coinciding quite accurately with the decline of literature. Chaucer died in 1400; the next writers that anyone still reads are Erasmus, More, Rabelais and Machiavelli, just after 1500. Hard information on what is widely read is admittedly not easy to come by, but here is some evidence: of the 282 volumes currently available in the Penguin Classics series, twelve and most of two others are from the fourteenth century; they include works of Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio. By contrast only two are from the fifteenth century. One is Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, a work of genuine piety, but with an attitude to intellectual matters typified by its remark that "I would rather feel compunction than be able to define it". The other is Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a not especially good example of a genre perfected hundreds of years earlier. A preoccupation with the past, in lieu of any developments in the present, was pervasive in the writings of the century, from the repetitive Arthurian and Trojan legends of England and France to the Italian humanists' obsessive commentaries on Latin rhetoric and poetical theory. The vanishing of past glories is almost the sole theme of Villon, the only French writer of the century who has any modern audience.
Literature in English suffered, if anything, an even worse eclipse than continental literatures. From the fourteenth century, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and other poems, Langland's Piers Plowman and the Gawain poems are still read, and not just by professional language students. But, except for Malory and a few lyric poets anthologised for completeness, it is hard to think of any writer in English between Chaucer and Spenser who is now read even by the most enthusiastic students. The gap is almost two hundred years.And his diatribe on Petrarch:A particular case of the way that the skill of the Renaissance in art has served to cover up its utter incompetence at anything else is evident in the admiration of many for Leonardo da Vinci. Admirers of the Renaissance have acclaimed him as a type of the Renaissance man; its detractors can, I think, do the same. Like the Renaissance itself, Leonardo was supposed to be good at everything. But on examination, it turns out he had nothing of importance to say on most subjects. Some histories of Italian literature do not mention Leonardo at all; those which do mostly approve his description of himself as a "man without letters" (he could not write in Latin at all), and advise us to look elsewhere for his achievements. Doing so, we find that a standard history of mathematics says "[his] published jottings on mathematics are trivial, even puerile, and show no mathematical talent whatever." Though he had some skill as a military engineer, he does not seem to have made any definite contributions to science or technology. Dreams about helicopters do not constitute great science. But he was a great painter.
Finally, if the Renaissance was not an age of intellectual brilliance, who put about the myth that it was, and to what end?
There is one man deserving most of the blame - Petrarch. Though in fact he lived at the time of the Black Death, a century before the Renaissance is usually thought to have begun, he first made most of the claims advanced by later advocates of the Renaissance. He hunted for manuscripts, and claimed to have rediscovered various ancient authors. He imitated Cicero, meaning his style rather than his content. He criticised the university scholars of his day for irrelevant dialectical subtleties and hair-splitting logic, though there is no evidence that he ever tried to understand what they were saying. He is said to have left Venice because some young university philosophers said he was "a good man, but illiterate." In view of his own dictum that "it is better to will the good than to know the truth", they were surely at least half right. Even on his chosen ground, lyric love poetry, it is possible to feel in his work a certain obviousness and lack of sensibility compared with, say, Guido Cavalcanti's Donna mi Prega of fifty years earlier. After writing several hundred sonnets cataloguing Laura's numerous charms and virtues and his own living deaths and delicious pains, he noted the news of her death in his copy of Virgil, in order that he might be constantly reminded of the decay of all earthly goals. He pulled off the century's most amazing propaganda stunt by having himself crowned as poet on the Capitoline Hill, reviving a supposed classical tradition. This was to celebrate, he said, the rebirth of poetry after a thousand years. Even if the troubadour lyrics, the Eddas and the Roman de la Rose had never been written, the idea of someone announcing the rebirth of poetry thirty years after Dante's death is just a disgrace.
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Originally Posted by Maverick
allowed to be listened to or something ?!
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