by Kevin Reilly
The key ingredient of the European twelfth-century Renaissance was the retrieval of many of the works of Aristotle and some of the Greek scientists. All these had been available in the original Greek or in Arabic translations but were unknown to Europeans before the twelfth century. Aristotle gave Europe a complete set of natural laws, internally consistent, logical, and sweeping in coverage but fundamentally at odds with much of church teaching. Aristotle’s principles of natural law held, for instance, that the universe had no cause since something could not be created from nothing and that the laws of nature were uniform and consistent, seemingly ruling out God and miracles in two easy assumptions.
The idea of a world of nature knowable to human reason was insidious in its simplicity and persuasiveness. Muslim and Christian clerics challenged Aristotle. Islam became increasingly critical of secular philosophy after 1000. Science was called “foreign,” making it an easier target for religious surveillance. Universities, madrassas, and mosque schools all emphasized Quranic education anyway; the only institution that taught Aristotle, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, eliminated it.
Christian Europe was more divided. When reading Aristotle was banned at the University of Paris, the other universities continued to teach his works. The faculty of the University of Toulouse advertised its teaching of Aristotle in order to steal Parisian students away. Eventually, Paris relented. In Europe, universities, cities, and states could act independently, even competitively. There was no emperor or caliph to impose a uniform curriculum or command. Christian Europe opened its doors enough to invite the Greek guest in because Europe had become accustomed to separate tables.
It would be a mistake to suggest that Aristotle or natural science monopolized the European mind in the twelfth century or even the fifteenth. Many of the greatest thinkers of the period sought to integrate reason and faith, science and theology, and the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem. Nevertheless, a significant part of European intellectual life was thereafter devoted to an idea of truth that required no prior commitment but could develop in a neutral space and lead where it would. “Truth in search of itself has no enemies,” the philosopher Peter Abelard (1079-1142) declared, convinced that God-given human reason could lead nowhere else. To be a “friend of truth” became a frequent call among European philosophers and theologians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.34
By the mid-thirteenth century, the works of Aristotle formed the core of the curriculum in most of the dozens of European universities. A master of arts degree at Paris or Oxford was heavily weighted with courses in logic, physics, astronomy, and mathematics. A modern historian writes,
Since virtually all students in arts studied a common curriculum, it became clear that higher education in the Middle Ages was essentially a program in logic and science. Never before, and not since, have logic and science formed the basis of higher education for all arts students.35
Popular Science . From the thirteenth century, students and professors at the universities studied and practiced science, but many of their less privileged neighbors became increasingly science minded. Monotheistic religion had long established the belief in absolute truth. Christianity had nurtured faith in human reason—in part, perhaps, to require responsibility in a world that the church did not fully control. This had the effect of emphasizing the power of the individual to understand. The Judeo-Christian idea that nature was God’s creation and that mankind was in charge of nature also contributed to a sense of scientific objectivity. In Christian cultures, humans were observers of nature rather than participants (as a Hindu, Buddhist, or Daoist might be). For late medieval European Christians, the world was a stage; for their ancestors and many pagans and polytheists, the world was more like a garment that one wore or the air that one breathed. Muslims, of course, shared the biblical belief in God’s creation, but they also had the Quran. Their religion called on specific pieces of scientific knowledge. They studied astronomy for such purposes as marking the beginning and end of the month of Ramadan with precision. They studied geometry and geography to align the prayer mats and mosques with Mecca. But they did not need science to understand the truths contained in the Quran. For Christians, lacking “The Book,” God’s Truth was contained in His creation. Nature was His book. Even the Bible was only a partial guide to a greater and continuing revelation. Consequently, Christian culture became more science minded than other cultures.
Europeans probably integrated science and technology more than other cultures as well. The historian Alfred Crosby suggests that “the West had a greater proportion of individuals who understood wheels, levers, and gears than any other region on earth.”36 The Christian intellectual class valued manual labor more than the masters of Confucianism. “To work is to pray” was the motto of the Benedictine monastic order.
By the fourteenth century, European society was full of machines. The most important for the development of science-mindedness was not the latest windmill or water mill but rather the mechanical clock. We do not think of the clock as a machine because it seems to do no more than tell time. But the clock is an elaborate mechanism of moving wheels, balances, and springs, and it does something that no other machine can do: it abstracts time. With the mechanical clock, time was abstracted from nature. Time was no longer slower in summer, lighter or darker, or cloudy or bright; it was a series of equal moments—abstract, interchangeable, neutral, and merely mathematical. Instead of the time the creek thaws or the mare foals, people began to tell time by numbers. Days were divided into hours, not prayer times or eating times, and those times came at different hours and minutes each day. Once the clocks were installed in the town square and in the church steeple, the bells would chime the hour, and the prayers and meals would follow the chimes. In the fourteenth century, European towns installed public clocks like there was no to-morrow—at least none to be wasted. The philosopher Nicola Oresme (ca. 1323-1382) coined a metaphor that would stand for the modern universe: he wrote that the “heavenly machine” was a kind of “clockwork.”37
Beginning in the fourteenth century, Europeans abstracted space as well. After a copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia arrived in Florence from Constantinople around 1400, Europeans imitated the ancient use of grid maps of neutral space and applied them to lands and oceans still unknown. They drew directional “plumb lines” for navigation charts and invented three-dimensional perspective in painting. They created lenses, spectacles, and, after 1600, telescopes. To think of things abstractly may be an element of scientific thinking that, once developed in one area, can be easily applied elsewhere: measurement, mathematics, alphabetization, and the notation of musical notes on gridlike staffs. All these scientific ways of thinking spread with great alacrity in Europe after 1400.
The Formation of
the Modern Network
By almost any measure, western Europe in 1000 had been a backwater. We have noted signs of growth and significant changes, but no one in 1000 would have imagined that in a mere 500 years, the small cities and states of western Europe not only would have joined the world system as an equal partner but also would have begun to seize control of it. We have probed the precocious rise of western Europe. We should keep in mind that most of the changes we have noted—the rise of cities, citizenship, modern states, the rule of law, and scientific laws and ideas—would have been unremarkable to most medieval observers. The Chinese or Muslim visitor to the West in the fourteenth century would have felt more pity than envy. We have already mentioned some of the raw comparisons: cities, libraries, and ironworks a fraction the size of those of China and the Islamic world and Europeans struggling without some of the basic conveniences of the then modern world, such as paper, printing, the classic literature of the Greeks, and ancient science and its Arabic improvements. As late as the thirteenth century, Arab astronomers were invited by the Chinese to Peking to run the Chinese observatory. As late as the fifteenth century, Chinese ships were the vessels of choice for the discriminating world traveler. As
late as the sixteenth century, Europeans were still using Arab medical texts. So it would seem that the rise of western Europe was still remote.
Death and Rebirth
We have already indicated how the late medieval period was slashed by the Black Death of 1348-1350. Europe suffered as much as China and the Muslim world. A third to a half of the population died. But we have also remarked that the people of Cairo suffered another 50 plagues in the next century and a half and that Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and much of the Muslim heartland was already in population and agricultural decline long before 1300. European agriculture and population may have peaked around 1280, but most parts of western Europe gradually recovered after 1350. Later plagues were far less frequent and less severe; they returned every 10 or 15 years, not every three. Temperatures cooled, farm yields shrank, and famine dogged those on the margins. To make matters worse, the ruling dynasties in England and France fought the Hundred Years’ War, which did not end until 1453.
Nevertheless, European society revived after the plague. Survivors found their labor in great demand. Dependent laborers gained leverage in negotiating with their “betters.” Despite the more challenging climate conditions, the average European lived better in 1450 than in 1300.
The Renaissance . Europe also experienced a cultural renaissance in the 200 years after the plague. Even before the plague, Italian painters like Cimabue (d. 1302) and Giotto (d. 1337) filled churches and canvases with strikingly unmedieval three-dimensional figures. They and their successors before 1450 still chose religious subjects for their art, their paintings and sculptures gracing altars, sacristies, and church doors. But they placed their patrons, their townsmen, and even themselves around the manger of the Christ child or looking up at Jesus on the cross.
While the Italian artists filled their religious paintings with Greek gods in contemporary Renaissance clothing and crafted meticulous spaces with scientific accuracy, artists in Flanders put a mirror to their world and each other. Dutch masters showed an Adam and Eve who in their nakedness resembled local peasants rather than Greek gods, and in the background they meticulously layered details of everyday life on a landscape so realistic that you could find your way without a map.
At the same time, the poets Dante (d. 1321), Petrarch (d. 1374), and Boccaccio (d. 1375) began the creation of a national Italian language and literature. Petrarch, who along with Boccaccio survived the plague, has been called the father of the Italian Renaissance. Refreshed by the discovery of Latin authors like Cicero, he expressed a classical faith in human capacity and civic virtue in a new vernacular language that he “got together [with] my lime and stones and wood.”38 The younger Boccaccio crafted a Florentine Italian language as modern as yesterday into what may have been Europe’s first piece of literature as entertainment, the Decameron, 100 tales of love and deception told by ladies and gentlemen waiting out the Black Death. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) did much the same for a Middle English language that would be less recognizable today.39 These Renaissance classics shock us with their modern secular tone, sexual themes, and entertaining narratives.
The Classical and the Novel
The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales were actually modeled on a literary form that may have originated in India and became known to Europeans in the form of A Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights, which, we have already noted, was compiled in Baghdad in the tenth century, probably from older Persian stories. The Arabic work, however, was always more popular in the West than in the Muslim world, where it was disparaged as inelegant, especially in its mix of classical and vernacular languages. Classical Arabic, the language of the Quran, enjoyed a status among Muslim clerics and intellectuals that was far beyond Latin in the West. The development of a vernacular or modern Arabic was not a project that anyone encouraged. Popular vernacular expressions were to be corrected rather than imitated.
We called the Decameron the first piece of modern European literature. Considerably older and as modern is the Japanese Tale of Genji, which was written by Lady Murasaki around 1000. It is sometimes called “the world’s first novel.” Why should Japan rather than China invent the novel? And why should it be written by a woman? In China, learning the characters and the classics defined the educated gentleman. The Chinese Empire and bureaucracy resisted local variations more than the plague. Classical Chinese authorized cultural expression throughout East Asia. The development of national identities was a gradual process of separation from China. In 1000, the Japanese popular vernacular was just in the process of distinguishing itself from classical Chinese. Chinese was the language of officials in Japan; it was considered inelegant for gentlemen to use the emerging vernacular. But that is why Lady Murasaki could use the popular speech and, like Boccaccio and Chaucer, invent her language as well as its literature. As a lady in waiting in the Japanese court, Murasaki was free of the pretensions of male officialdom. She and Sei Shonogon, another courtesan, were not embarrassed to write in Japanese, and they had much to say. As cultural outsiders, women could be more inventive.
Japan and Korea
Japan was to China as Europe was to Rome, Byzantium, and the Dar al-Islam: an underdeveloped outlier where a sense of cultural inferiority encouraged eager imitation of the dominant culture but also provided the space for experimentation and innovation. Both areas, on opposite ends of Eurasia, escaped the Mongols. Both grew rapidly between 1000 and 1300 (Japan continuing apace until 1700). Japan’s political geography was also similar to that of Europe in some ways: both created maritime cities rather than large land empires, and Japanese cities resembled European city-states even in their relative autonomy. The city-states and small maritime states were the innovators of Europe as they were of the Muslim world. If East Asia had nurtured other Japans, their competition and interchange might have forced innovation more quickly.
One other potential Japan was Korea. In fact, because Korea was adjacent to China, it was more dominated by the classical Chinese language and culture than was Japan. As the Korean language diverged from Chinese, the scholars and administrators of the Korean court (which recruited officials with its own Confucian examination system) struggled using Chinese characters to write Korean.
During the first half of the fifteenth century, under the guidance of King Sejong, Korea experienced a cultural revival that bore similarities to the Italian Renaissance. The king gathered many scholars to his court, some merely to follow their stars, others to help with some of the king’s pet projects in language, printing, music, and science. The common theme of the king’s projects was the realization of certain principles that he believed to be in keeping with the neo-Confucian movement sweeping China. In China, neo-Confucianism meant Confucianism tempered by Buddhist meditation. To King Sejong, neo-Confucianism meant more Confucian emphasis on public welfare (and less Buddhist introspection). All his reforms, the king declared, were intended to educate and uplift the people. In two critical areas, these reforms bear a striking resemblance to a combination that was soon to transform Europe. King Sejong chose to greatly increase the use of printing with movable type, and he chose to create a Korean alphabet. He accomplished both. In the preface to his New Korean Phonetic script, the king wrote, “Because our language differs from the Chinese language, my poor people cannot express their thoughts in Chinese writing. In my pity for them I create 28 letters, which all can easily learn and use in their daily lives.”40 In addition, he dedicated his rule to the spread of knowledge through printing by metal movable type:
To govern it is necessary to spread knowledge of the laws and the books so as to satisfy reason and reform men’s evil nature; in this way peace and order may be maintained. Our country is in the East beyond the sea and books from China are scarce. Wood-blocks wear out easily and besides it is difficult to engrave all the books in the world. I want letters to be made from copper to be used for printing so that more books will be available. This would produce benefits too extensive to measure.41
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p; In Europe, the combination of a phonetic script and a printing press based on movable type caused a revolution in popular literacy and linguistic invention. In Korea, it had no such effect. In fact, the two reforms were rarely combined. Despite the advantage of setting a phonetic system with movable type, most Korean books continued to be block printed, and few works were written in the new script. The book that introduced the alphabet in 1446, The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People, was block printed. During King Sejong’s reign, 194 books were printed in woodblock and 114 in metal print; 70 of the latter were on the subjects of Chinese history, Chinese characters, Chinese classics and literature, and Chinese law.42 As in Japan, the educated elite preferred the use of classical Chinese characters, while Korean women used the new Han’gul alphabet in writing Korean.
King Sejong’s alphabet for writing Korean sounds was uniquely innovative. The letters not only stood for particular vowels, consonants, or syllables but also were shaped to suggest the position of mouth, teeth, and tongue in pronouncing the sounds. In addition, the letters were divided into Yin and Yang types and made to represent the five elements: air, earth, fire, water, and metal. The richness of the invention, however, made other things more difficult. The Han’gul script carried layers of meaning that hindered its use as a tool for abstraction in the way the European alphabets could be used to alphabetize. Very much like the original idea of the length of a king’s “foot,” until measurements could be completely divorced from their natural associations, scientific abstraction was encumbered.
Imitators and Innovators
We think of imitators as the opposite of innovators, but they are not. Those who see no reason to imitate have no reason to change. Large landed empires like China and the Muslim states of central Asia were guided by people who had a greater stake in preservation. Innovation in China often came inadvertently or in response to a particular crisis. Confucianism encouraged good works, social improvements, and good government, and the Chinese state and bureaucracy could put enormous resources behind a policy or project. The private sector in China was huge because China was huge, but the government was the force behind the building of canals and cities and the adoption of new military and industrial technologies. If the social conscience of Confucianism was an advantage, the elitism of the scholar administrators was not. Mind work and manual labor marked two different worlds in China as they had in most societies, and the workers and thinkers had no place or inclination to talk to each other. New tools and new ideas rarely struck a chord much less a chorus.