6.5 Knowledge and ideas

New ideas

The other key event defining the beginning of the early modern period was a cultural movement associated with new ways of thinking: the Renaissance. This refers to the re-examination or rediscovery of texts from classical Greece and Rome which began in Italy. (Confusingly, the English term ‘renaissance’ comes from the French word for ‘rebirth’; sometimes you may find historians using the Italian word ‘rinascimento’ instead.) The term was coined by nineteenth-century historians, but scholars working in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did see themselves as making a break with the past. Petrarch (1304–1374), an Italian scholar and poet, was one of the first to think of his time as distinctively different from previous ages and to divide history into periods: the ancient world, the Middle Ages and his own, modern period. Renaissance scholars claimed to be rediscovering the knowledge of the ancient world, although in fact medieval scholars had worked on ancient texts. But Renaissance scholars were interested in different aspects of ancient scholarship, particularly rhetoric (the art of creating a persuasive argument) and languages. They produced new translations of and commentaries on Greek, Hebrew and Latin texts, developed new forms of education and new techniques in art, and placed a new emphasis on the use of observation as a basis for knowledge. Moreover, the retrieval and study of theological texts written by early scholars such as St Augustine (354–430 CE) helped to drive church reform. These ideas spread across Europe in the fifteenth century.

The Renaissance emphasis on observation and reason as the means of developing better understandings of the world underpinned further periods of new intellectual enquiry: the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. From the sixteenth century onwards, scholars brought the new emphasis on observation to the study of mathematics, physics, astronomy and anatomy. For example, Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), professor of anatomy at Padua University, published De Humani Corporis Fabrica (‘On the fabric of the human body’) in 1543 (Figure 10). Where medieval anatomy texts drew the human body in ways that fitted with humoral theory, Vesalius based his illustrations on observations made during the dissection of bodies. However, while Vesalius pointed out errors in older texts, he retained his belief in classical theories of how the body worked. Similarly, Copernicus revealed that ancient explanations of the movement of the planets, based on the idea that the earth was at the centre of the heavens, conflicted with actual observation. His book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (‘On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres’), published in 1543, revolutionised astronomy by placing the sun at the centre of the solar system, but retained the circular orbits used by earlier scholars.

In the Enlightenment, beginning in the late seventeenth century, scholars expanded their field of study to cover biology, chemistry and the ‘science of man’, exploring how the mind worked and how people interacted in different societies. The overall goal of Enlightenment thinkers was the improvement of human life. Old sources of authority, including the church and the monarchy, were subjected to severe criticism and scholars attempted to create greater political freedoms through a new relationship between ‘enlightened’ rulers and the people.