Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  Thinking Through Plague and Cold

  Intellectuals ruled – to judge from the episodes traditionally highlighted in histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution succeeded each other, marking the world more deeply than changes of dynasty and fortunes of war. Even ‘the Age of Expansion’ – the conventional name for the era as a whole – was the product of expanding minds: ‘the discovery of the world and of man’. In the background, of course, other forces were also at work: recurrent plagues; dispiriting cold; and transmutations and relocations of life forms (‘biota’ in the scientists’ lexicon) unendowed with mind – plants, animals, microbes – amounting to a global ecological revolution.

  The shifts of biota changed the face of the planet more than any innovation since the invention of agriculture. Rather as farming modified evolution by introducing what we might call unnatural selection – but more so – changes that began in the sixteenth century went further, reversing a long-standing evolutionary pattern. Since something like 150 million years ago, when Pangea split apart, and oceans began to sever the continents from one another, life forms in the separate landmasses became ever more distinct. Eventually the New World came to breed species unknown elsewhere. Australian flora and fauna became unique, unexampled in the Americas or Afro-Eurasia. With extraordinary suddenness, 150 million years of evolutionary divergence yielded to a convergent trend, which has dominated the last few centuries, spreading similar life forms across the planet. Now there are llamas and wallabies in English country parks, and kiwi fruit are an important part of the economy of my corner of Spain. The ‘native’ cuisines of Italy and Sichuan, Bengal and Kenya, rely on plants of American origin – chillies, potatoes, ‘Indian’ corn, tomatoes – while the mealtimes of much of America would be unrecognizable without the wine and kine that came from Europe, the coffee from Arabia, or Asian rice or sugar. A single disease environment covers the planet: you can catch any communicable illness just about anywhere.

  The world-girdling journeys of European colonizers and explorers gave biota a ride across the oceans. In some cases planters and ranchers transferred breeds deliberately in an attempt to exploit new soils or create new varieties. To that extent, the revolution conformed to the argument of this book: people reimagined the world and worked to realize the idea. But many vital seeds, germs, insects, predators, and stowaway pets made what Disney might call ‘incredible journeys’ in people’s seams and pockets, or in ships’ stores or bilges, to new environments where their effects were transforming.1

  Meanwhile, an age of plague afflicted the world.2 It began in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death wiped out great swathes of people – a third of the population in the worst-affected regions – in Eurasia and North Africa. For the next three hundred years, baffling plagues recurred frequently in all these areas. The DNA of the bacillus that seems to have been responsible was almost identical to the agent that causes what we now call bubonic plague. But there was a crucial difference: bubonic plague likes hot environments. The world of the fourteenth century to the eighteenth was exceptionally cold. Climate historians call it the Little Ice Age.3 The most virulent plagues often coincided with intensely cold spells. The wintry landscapes Dutch artists painted in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the cold was at its sharpest, convey a sense of what it looked and felt like. In the sixteenth century, moreover, some Old World diseases, especially smallpox, spread to the Americas, killing off about ninety per cent of the indigenous population in areas where the effects were most concentrated.

  So this was an age when environment exceeded intellect in its impact on the world. No one has ever explained the obvious paradox: why did so much progress – or what we think of as progress – happen in such unpropitious circumstances? How did the victims of plague and cold launch the movements we call the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution? How did they explore the world and reunite sundered continents? Maybe it was a case of what the great but now unfashionable historian Arnold Toynbee called ‘challenge and response’. Maybe no general explanation will serve, and we must look separately at the particular circumstances of each new initiative. In any case, even in a time when impersonal forces put terrible constraints on human creativity, the power of minds could evidently still imagine transformed worlds, issue world-changing ideas, and generate transmutative initiatives. Indeed, in some places the output of innovative thinking seems to have been faster than ever – certainly faster than in any earlier period that is comparably well documented.

  New ideas were concentrated, disproportionately, in Europe. Partly because of this intellectual fertility, and partly because of the export of European ideas by European trade and imperialism, the age of plague and cold was also a long period of gradual but unmistakable shift in the worldwide balance of inventiveness, innovation, and influential thinking. For thousands of years, historical initiative – the power, that is, of some human groups to influence others – had been concentrated in the civilizations of Asia, such as India, the world of Islam, and, above all, China. In technology, China had generated most of the world’s most impressive inventions: paper and printing were the foundation of modern communications; paper money was the basis of capitalism; gunpowder ignited modern warfare; in the blast furnace modern industrial society was forged; the compass, rudder, and separable bulkhead were the making of modern shipping and maritime endeavour. In the meantime, glassmaking was the only key technology in which the West possessed clear superiority (except perhaps for mechanical clock-making, which was maybe a Chinese invention but certainly a Western speciality).4

  By the late seventeenth century, however, the signs were accumulating that Chinese supremacy was under strain from European competition. The representative event – perhaps it would not be excessive to call it a turning point – occurred in 1674, when the Chinese emperor took control of the imperial astronomical observatory out of the hands of native scholars and handed it over to the Jesuits. Throughout the period and, in some respects, into the nineteenth century, Europeans continued to look to China for exemplars in aesthetics and philosophy and to ‘take our models from the wise Chinese’.5 Chinese economic superiority, meanwhile, measured by the balance of trade across Eurasia in China’s favour, was not reversed until about the 1860s. It was increasingly evident, however, that the big new ideas that challenged habits and changed societies were beginning to come overwhelmingly from the West. If the Little Ice Age, the Columbian Exchange, and the end of the age of plague were the first three conspicuous features of the early modern world, Europe’s great leap forward was the fourth.

  Europe is therefore the place to start trawling for the key ideas of the time. We can begin with the didactic, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas we usually bundle together and label ‘the Renaissance’, which preceded and perhaps helped to shape the Scientific Revolution.

  We must start by identifying what the Renaissance was and was not, and locating where it happened and where it came from, before turning, in the following section, to the problem of where it went.

  ‌Forward to the Past: The Renaissance

  If I had my way, we would drop the word ‘Renaissance’ from our historical lexicon. It was invented in 1855 by Jules Michelet, a French historian who wanted to emphasize the recovery or ‘rebirth’ of ancient learning, classical texts, and the artistic heritage of Greece and Rome in the way people thought about and pictured the world. Michelet was a writer of immense gifts, but, like many historians, he got his inspiration by reflecting on his own time; he tended to use history to explain the present rather than the past. In 1855, a renaissance really was under way. More boys learned Latin – and innumerably more learned Greek – than ever before. Scholarship was making ancient texts available in good editions on an unprecedented scale. The stories and characters they disclosed were the subjects of art and the inspiration of writers. Michelet detected in his own times an affinity with fifteenth-century Italy. He thou
ght the modernity he saw there had been transmitted to France as a result of the passage to and fro of armies during the wars that took French invaders into Italy repeatedly from the 1490s to the 1550s. His theory became textbook orthodoxy, and successor historians elaborated on it, tracing everything they thought ‘modern’ back to the same era and the same part of the world. I recall my own teacher, when I was a little boy, chalking on the board, in his slow, round writing, ‘1494: Modern Times Begin’. Critics, meanwhile, have been chipping away at this powerful orthodoxy, demonstrating that classical aesthetics were a minority taste in most of Italy in the fifteenth century. Even in Florence, where most people look for the heartland of the Renaissance, patrons preferred the gaudy, gemlike painting of Gozzoli and Baldovinetti, whose work resembles the glories of medieval miniaturists, bright with costly pigments, to classicizing art. Much of what Florentine artists thought was classical in their city was bogus: the Baptistery was really early medieval. The Basilica of San Miniato, which the cognoscenti thought was a Roman temple, had been built in the eleventh century. Almost everything I – and probably you, dear reader – learned about the Renaissance in school was false or misleading.6

  For instance: ‘It inaugurated modern times.’ No: every generation has its own modernity, which grows out of the past. ‘It was unprecedented.’ No: scholarship has detected many prior renaissances. ‘It was secular’ or ‘It was pagan.’ Not entirely: the Church remained the patron of most art and scholarship. ‘It was art for art’s sake.’ No: politicians and plutocrats manipulated it. ‘Its art was realistic in a new way.’ Not altogether: perspective was a new technique, but much pre-Renaissance art was realistic in depicting emotions and anatomies. ‘The Renaissance elevated the artist.’ Yes, but only in a sense: medieval artists might achieve sainthood; the wealth and worldly titles some Renaissance artists received were derogatory by comparison. ‘It dethroned scholasticism and inaugurated humanism.’ No: Renaissance humanism grew out of medieval scholastic humanism. ‘It was Platonist and Hellenophile.’ No: there were patches of Platonism, as there had been before, but few scholars did more than dabble in Greek. ‘It rediscovered lost antiquity.’ Not really: antiquity had never been lost and classical inspiration never withered (though there was an upsurge in the fifteenth century). ‘It discovered nature.’ Hardly: there was no pure landscape painting in Europe previously, but nature achieved cult status in the thirteenth century, when St Francis discovered God outdoors. ‘It was scientific.’ No: for every scientist, as we shall see, there was a sorcerer.7

  Still, there really was an acceleration of long-standing or intermittent interest in reviving the supposed glories of antiquity in the medieval West, and I daresay we must go on calling it the Renaissance, even though researchers have discovered or asserted revivals of classical ideas, style, and imagery in just about every century from the fifth to the fifteenth. There was, for instance, a ‘renaissance’ of classical architecture among basilica builders in Rome even before the last Western Roman Emperor died. Historians often speak of a Visigothic renaissance in seventh-century Spain, a Northumbrian renaissance in eighth-century England, a Carolingian renaissance in ninth-century France, an Ottonian renaissance in tenth- and eleventh-century Germany, and so on. The ‘renaissance of the twelfth century’ is recognized in the routine lexicon of historians of Latin Christendom.

  In some ways, the classical tradition never needed revival: writers and artists almost always exploited classical texts and models where and when they could get them.8 Consular diptychs inspired the decorator of a church in eighth-century Oviedo. In eleventh-century Frómista, in northern Spain, the carver of a capital had no example of the famous ancient Greek representation of Laocoön to hand, but he based his work on Pliny’s description of it. Florentine builders of the same period copied a Roman temple sufficiently well to deceive Brunelleschi. A sculptor in thirteenth-century Orvieto made a creditable imitation of a Roman sarcophagus. What we usually call ‘Gothic’ architecture of the high Middle Ages was often decorated with classicizing sculpture. Throughout the period these examples cover, writers of moral and natural philosophy continued to echo such works of Plato and Aristotle as they could get hold of, and prose stylists often sought the most nearly classical models they could find.

  As renaissances multiply in the literature in the West, so they appear with increasing frequency in scholars’ accounts of episodes of the revival of antique values elsewhere.9 Unsurprisingly, renaissances have become part of the vocabulary of historians of Byzantium, too, especially in the context of the revival of humanist scholarship and retrospective arts in Constantinople in the late eleventh century. Byzantine ivory-workers, who usually avoided pagan and lubricious subjects, were able in a brief dawn to make such delicate confections as the Veroli casket, where the themes are all of savagery tamed by art, love, and beauty. Hercules settles to play the lyre, attended by cavorting putti. Centaurs play for the Maenads’ dance. Europa poses prettily on her bull’s back, pouting at pursuers and archly waving her flimsy stole.10 Transmissions of classical models came from eastern Christendom, especially through Syriac translations of classical texts and via Byzantine art and scholarship, from regions around the eastern Mediterranean where the classical tradition was easier to sustain than in the West.

  Muslims occupied much of the heartland of classical antiquity in the Hellenistic world and the former Roman Empire. They therefore had access to the same legacy as Latin Christians: indeed, the availability of texts and intact monuments from Greco-Roman antiquity was superior in Islam, which covered relatively less despoiled and ravaged parts of the region. So not only is it reasonable, in principle, to look for renaissances in the Islamic world; it would be surprising if there were none. Indeed, some of the texts with which Latin Christendom renewed acquaintance in the Renaissance had formerly passed through Muslim hands and Arabic translations, from which Western copyists and retranslators recovered them.

  Renaissance-hunters can find them in China, where neo-Confucian revivals happened at intervals during what we think of as the Middle Ages and the early modern period in the West. One might without much more contrivance also cite retrospective scholarship in seventeenth-century Edo, reconstructing classic texts, rediscovering forgotten values, and searching for authentic versions of Shinto poems, half-a-millennium old, which became the basis of a born-again Shintoism, stripped of the accretions of the intervening centuries.

  The Renaissance mattered less for reviving what was old – for that was a commonplace activity – than for inaugurating what was new. In art, this meant working out principles that, by the seventeenth century, were called ‘classical’ and were enforced as rules by artistic academies. The rules included mathematical proportion, which made music harmonious, as the secret of how to contrive beauty. Accordingly, architects and archaeologists privileged shapes that varied from time to time and school to school: the circle, the triangle, and the square in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; from the sixteenth century onwards the ‘golden’ rectangle (with short sides two-thirds the length of the long ones); and, later, the spiral and the ‘serpentine line’. Other rules enjoined the observation of mathematically calculated perspective (first explained by Leon Battista Alberti in a work of 1418); the embodiment of ancient philosophical ideas, such as Plato’s of the ideal form or Aristotle’s of the inner substance that a work of art should seem to wrest from whatever part of nature it represented; the demand that an artist should, as Shakespeare said, ‘surpass life’ in depicting perfection; and, above all, the rule that realism should mean more than the mere imitation of nature – rather, it should be an attempt to reach transcendent reality. ‘It is not only Nature’, said J. J. Winckelmann, who codified classicism in a work of 1755, in his first translator’s version, ‘which the votaries of the Greeks find in their works, but still something more, something superior to Nature; ideal beauties, brain-born images’.11

  In learning, similarly, what was new in the late-medieval West was
not so much a renaissance as a genuinely new departure. Schools in France and northern Italy in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries shifted the curriculum toward a family of subjects called ‘humanist’, concentrating on ‘humane’ subjects, rather than the abstractions of formal logic or the superhuman horizon of theology and metaphysics, or the infrahuman objects of the natural sciences. The humanist curriculum privileged moral philosophy, history, poetry, and language. These were the studies Francis Bacon had in mind when he said that they were not only for ornament but also for use.12 The aim was to equip students for eloquence and argument – saleable skills in a continent full of emulous states and a peninsula full of rival cities, just as they had been in the China of the Warring States, or the Greece of competing cities.

  There were consequences for the way scholars beheld the world. To humanists, a historical point of view came easily: an awareness that culture changes. To understand old texts – the classics, say, or the Bible – you have to take into account the way the meanings of words and the web of cultural references have changed in the meantime. Humanists’ interests in the origins of language and the development of societies turned their researches outward, to the new worlds and remote cultures the explorers of the period disclosed. Boccaccio cannibalized travellers’ lexica of new languages. Marsilio Ficino, a Florentine priest and physician who worked for the Medici, pored uncomprehendingly over Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both wanted to know what language Adam spoke in Eden, and where the first writing came from.

  The Renaissance did not spring fully armed in Italy or any part of the West. It is necessary to insist on this point, because academic Eurocentrism – the assertion of uniqueness of Western achievements and their unparalleled impact on the rest of the world – makes the Renaissance one of the West’s gifts to the rest. Great cultural movements do not usually happen by parthenogenesis. Cross-fertilization nearly always helps and is usually vital. We have seen how much trans-Eurasian contacts contributed to the new ideas of the first millennium bce. It is hard to accept that the high-medieval fluorescence of ideas and technologies in western Europe was unstimulated by influences that flowed with the ‘Mongol Peace’. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century borrowed aesthetic and political models from China, India, and Japan, and relied on contacts with remoter cultures, in the Americas and the Pacific, for some new ideas. If the Renaissance happened in Europe without comparable external influences, the anomaly would be startling.