Late Middle Ages

The Renaissance Beyond Italy

By the 1490s the new learning of Italy was no longer an Italian affair. Humanist schools, reformed Latin prose, and the Italianate visual style had taken root in the courts and university towns of the Empire, the Low Countries, France, England, and the Iberian peninsula, and the spread was decisively accelerated by the printing press. The Northern Renaissance that resulted was not a copy of the Italian one: it was shaped by the universities of Paris, Louvain, and Cologne, by the religious trauma of the Reformation, and by a tradition of vernacular writing and detailed naturalism in the visual arts that had its own medieval ancestry. The three articles collected here trace the routes by which the Italian learning arrived in the North, the distinctive programme of Christian humanism associated with Erasmus, and the technology that turned the whole movement into a European event.

Routes of transmission: how the new learning reached the North

The first article, The Northern Renaissance and its distinct path, follows the routes by which Italian humanism, Italian art, and the Italian book reached the courts and cities of the North. The great printed commentaries and the travels of scholars — Rudolf Agricola in Italy in the 1470s, Erasmus’s first visit to Italy in 1506, Albrecht Dürer’s two trips to Venice in 1494–95 and 1505–07 — set the terms on which the new learning was absorbed. Dürer’s engravings, the Melencolia I of 1514 and the Knight, Death, and the Devil of 1513, are at once Italianate in their command of anatomy and perspective and unmistakably Northern in their minute attention to surface and texture. The article also takes seriously the medieval inheritance of the North: the great Gothic cathedrals, the mysticism of the Devotio Moderna of the Geert Groote circle at Deventer, and the breviaries and Books of Hours that shaped the visual sensibility of the region before the Italian style ever arrived. The Northern reception of Italian art is the subject of some of the most interesting recent scholarship, in particular the work of Joseph Koerner on Dürer and of Ethan Shagan on print culture in the early Reformation.

Christian humanism: Erasmus, More, and the reform of letters

The second article, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Christian humanism, takes up the most distinctive Northern contribution to the European Renaissance: the application of humanist philology to the Bible and to Christian life. Erasmus’s Adagia (1500, expanded 1508 and many times after), his Greek New Testament of 1516, and his satirical Praise of Folly (1511) are the touchstones; but the article also treats Erasmus’s English friend Thomas More, whose Utopia (1516) is the most influential product of Northern Christian humanism, and the wider circle that included John Colet, the Dutch pope Adrian VI, the Spanish humanist Juan de Valdés, and the printing house of Johann Froben in Basel. The historiographical debate is significant: nineteenth-century readers cast Erasmus as a hesitant forerunner of the Reformation; the work of scholars such as James McConica, Erika Rummel, and Lisa Jardine has produced a more difficult Erasmus, both more conservative in his institutional loyalties and more radical in his critical methods, and one whose commitment to a reformed Christian paideia was neither Lutheran nor simply Catholic.

Gutenberg, the press, and the European Republic of Letters

The third article, The invention of the printing press and the spread of ideas, treats the technical and commercial machinery that made the European circulation of the new learning possible. Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz issued the 42-line Bible around 1455; within a generation there were presses in Rome, Venice, Paris, Leuven, Basel, and Cologne, and by 1500 the cities of Venice, Paris, and Lyon were producing books on a scale that would have been physically impossible in a manuscript economy. Anthony Grafton and others have stressed the continuity between the manuscript world and the print world — the printers of the fifteenth century were heirs of the humanist scriptoria of the 1450s and 1460s, and the transition was gradual. The article also takes up the role of print in the Reformation, where the connection is direct: some 300,000 copies of Martin Luther’s writings were circulating in German-speaking lands by 1522, and the Ninety-five Theses of 1517 reached an audience that no fifteenth-century indulgence controversy could have reached.

Articles in this section

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