Emerton The Beginnings of Modern Europe (1250-1450)

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5183-2404-8
Verlag: Krill Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 760 Seiten

This is a title about the makings of modern Europe, tracing the history of the continent from the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the modern era.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Emerton, Ephraim

Leseproben

About Wallachia Publishers Wallachia Publishers mission is to publish the world’s finest European history texts. More information on our recent publications and catalog can be found on our website. The period of which this volume treats differs fundamentally both from that which precedes and from that which follows it. In each of those periods we are able to fix our attention upon a certain well-defined set of institutions which completely control its activities. In the former, the strictly mediaeval, we see Europe wholly under the sway of two vast ideas, feudalism and the Roman church system. In the latter, the purely modern period, Europe has almost wholly lost those ideas and has come out into the familiar political structure of a family of independent national states and into the freer air of religious toleration, if not yet of religious liberty. Between these two lies the period which is the subject of our present study. It is a chapter in human history of which no brief general description can be given. It is impossible to point to any peculiar institutions that govern its life. As we try to unfold the tangled thread of its history we seem to find only confusion and disorder. It reminds one in many ways of that other and even greater confusion that lies between the records of Rome and those of the Germanic Middle Ages. There we are conscious of a mighty civilization passing away and of another just vaguely taking shape in rude barbaric forms which, however, contain the germs of a new and more vigorous life. “So here again we find two opposing currents in the stream of human history, and already at the beginning of our study it is clear which of them is destined to prevail. The vast, picturesque structure of the Middle Ages has done its service and is beginning to crumble. In every direction the resistless forces of the modern world are undermining its foundations or with bolder front are beating in open assault against its walls. To the careful student there is neither disorder nor confusion in the process. It is simply a natural development working out its results by the method of inevitable compensation. In the earlier transition—that from Rome to the Middle Ages—the shock of change is the greater because there is a change also in the race which is to be the bearer of the world‘s civilization. That whole transition may be summed up dramatically in the contrast of Roman and Teuton. Not only do institutions disappear, but the very race which created them disappears also as a historical unit. A new Europe is brought into the ken of history by a new race actually, in physical fact, emerging out of the darkness and taking its place in the great procession of historic peoples. In the present transition there is no such dramatic moment. The nations which make the modern world are the same that had brought mediaeval culture to its height. They have simply been going through a process of education and are now just beginning to see the meaning of it. The new succeeds the old through the silent working of development. Not that this period is without its great conflicts. There is enough of the dramatic in the sharp contrast of ideas and in the clashing of ancient rights with newly asserted claims to make every chapter of this transition alive with vivid interest. It will be of service to us at the outset to formulate these contrasts and these conflicts into some general expression which may serve us as a guide in our study of details. Our period has never been better characterized than by Michelet in the phrase: “The Discovery of the World and of Man,” a phrase which seems at first only a mystic symbol of nothing in particular but which, understood, lets us in to the very heart of the apparent puzzle of this period. The theories of mediaeval life represented Man as subject, in all his relations, to the domination of certain great general ideals to which the individual must surrender himself. A deep distrust of Man, as of a being essentially unworthy, pervades mediaeval thought. Ideas then had value only as they stood related to a certain ideal Truth vaguely comprehended, it is true, but nevertheless firmly believed in,—nay, believed in the more firmly because it was not comprehended. For, to the mediaeval mind there was a distinct element of error and of wrong in anything that depended upon observation through the senses or upon the reflection of the human intellect. All that world of phenomena which we call “real” because, as we say, we can grasp it by our senses and make it our own by some act of the reasoning mind, all this was to the mediaeval man unreal and untrustworthy. For him the only “reality“ was the unseen ideal of which these phenomena of the sense and reason were only the illusive shadows. The result was that blindness of the eyes and dullness of the mind became to him a kind of solemn duty. He hardly dared open his eyes wide upon the world of beauty and order about him lest it might turn him from those higher contemplations in which he hoped by some specific divine inspiration to catch the secret of the Infinite. Naturally these conceptions solidified into institutions. Out of the notion of the “reality“ of abstract ideas grew up the great system of the scholastic philosophy. If it were indeed true that there was a determined volume of religious truth, then it followed that there must be some human organization by which that truth should be made known to men, and that was the Church, an abstraction made concrete in the Roman papal system. If the idea of power were indeed a divine concept, then there must be some human order in which the divine will should have made this abstraction also concrete, and there was the beautiful feudal hierarchy, independent of all limitations of country or of race, culminating in that mysterious idea of the Mediaeval Empire, which was to be, above all other earthly powers, the interpreter of the divine order in human affairs, responsible to God alone. So in the realm of human law. It was not for any man, not even a king, to declare this or that principle in law because, in his opinion, it was right or just or expedient. The law was there, a body of tradition received from the fathers, to be practiced, not improved. The Law was above all laws, and it would have been presumption for any individual to claim the right to change it. In the world of art it was the same. The Middle Ages produced perhaps the grandest expression of the artistic spirit the world has known, the Gothic architecture; and yet we are in almost total ignorance of the individual genius that inspired and carried out those wonderful designs. Whichever way we turn in the middle period we are impressed with the fact that individual thought and action had only a subordinate place. The individual was of value only in so far as he made himself the agent of some one of the great dominant ideals by which society was ruled. There was throughout this time a something positively impious in the idea that a man was worth something for himself because he was a thinking being, with a mind given him to use and therefore worthy of his respect. The most vivid expression of this feeling is seen in the immense hold of the ascetic principle. The typical man of the Middle Ages is he who can most completely deaden himself to all natural impulses. The more completely a man could repress his self and sink himself in the mass according to one or another of the accepted methods, the more nearly he approached to the mediaeval idea of perfection. We come to realize all this only when we begin to contrast the mediaeval spirit with that which animates every great undertaking of the period we are studying. In every field of human effort one perceives now a significant change. The individual human being begins to assert his right to weigh and measure the universe by the standards of his own intelligence. A bold spirit of inquiry and of assertion begins to take the place of a timid yielding to existing authority. Grand general ideas, such as the sole and sufficient authority of the Church in matters of thought, begin to lose their hold. Uniformity of life ceases to be the highest ideal of society, and diversity begins to be respected. A man is no longer crushed when he puts forward an idea, but may at least be heard and has a fighting chance of winning his way. The two splendid fictions of the Middle Ages, the universal Empire and the universal Church, have both ceased to command an absolute allegiance and are adjusting themselves to a changing order of things. The nations are escaping from the leveling theory of a universal Christian state under ecclesiastical control and are declaring their right to exist, each for itself, and to work out, each in its own way, the problems of administration and of social progress that lie before them. An immense material advance—the effect chiefly of the growth of a great vigorous and determined middle class—is carrying the European populations forward to ever-new demands upon life and ever-fresh exertions to satisfy them. New lines of trade and manufacture are widening the intelligence and capacity of the productive classes. Science, which under both ancient and mediaeval conditions had existed chiefly as philosophy, now begins to venture upon the method of experiment. All men are no longer satisfied with saying, “These things are so because according to certain premises they ought to be so“; some bold spirits are daring to say, “These things are so because we see or feel them to be so.” Human powers of observation...