THE CREATION OF THE WORLD. h)j an anonymous artist-one of 124 woodcuts in Luther's 1534 Bible—depicts an elaborately vested Cod presiding over the new earth. Luther's translation not only gave people an understandable version of the Scriptures, but helped establish modern vernacular German.
Never before the 16th Century had men been so intoxicated with the power of the written word; never before had the written word reached so many men. Printing made it possible; Reformation furor and Renaissance elan combined to accelerate it.
By a curious paradox, Germany led all Europe in printing but lagged in writing. Most German thinkers of the century spent their energies on the religious quarrel, and their ideas found expression in tracts and pamphlets. But the major contributions to 16th Century letters were made by France, Spain and England—and although all these countries had printers, the German cities of Strasbourg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Cologne, Leipzig, Frankfort and Magdeburg provided much of the printing for the rest of Europe.
In some measure the Reformation was a reaction against the Renaissance; yet the reformers were themselves indebted to the revival they spurned. For it was the Renaissance acquaintance with Greek that led to the re-examination of the early versions of the Scriptures, which in turn enabled the reformers to examine religious beliefs. And in the end Renaissance humanism reasserted itself— not in Germany, but in France and England. The result was a revolution in the literature of Europe. Preoccupation with the Greek and Latin classics gave way to writings in the vernacular; religious fervor was superseded by secularism; and literacy, once the monopoly of the scholarly elite, spread to the people.
The author who most vividly reflected this intellectual ferment at its outset was Erasmus—witty, urbane and scholarly, called by a friend the "glory of our age." More than any other man in the early 16th Century, Erasmus articulated the failings of the Church and society, and he did much to generate the movement that the reformers carried out.
Erasmus put his own hand to nearly every subject and to several of the genres that marked loth Century literature—theology and social criticism, translation, poetry and satire. His greatest original work was the Encomium moriae, translated as The Praise of Folly, but in Erasmus' Latin a doubleentendre that also gave praise to his friend Sir Thomas More.
The Praise of Folly is an artful vision of the ab-
Surdity of human behavior, a brilliant jest combining fancy and soberness, in which Folly, addressing mankind, asserts that she is useful—indeed, essential—to life. "Without me," she says, "the world cannot exist for a moment. For is not all that is done. . . among mortals full of folly; is it not performed by fools and for fools?"
Folly, says Erasmus, is the antithesis of reason; it is evil delusion, responsible for war and worldliness, for all the ills of life. Yet folly makes life sufferable. "No society, no cohabitation can be pleasant or lasting without folly; so much so that a people could not stand its prince, nor the master his man, nor the maid her mistress, nor the tutor his pupil, nor the friend his friend, nor the wife her husband for a moment longer if they did not now and then err together, now flatter each other; now sensibly conniving at things, now smearing themselves with some honey of folly."
Folly surveys the whole range of human behavior: love and sacrifice, courage and cowardice, reason and madness, statesmanship and scholarship. She deals sharply with all phases of society, but she is particularly hard on the Church. She pokes fun at theologians, who "will tell you to a tittle all the successive proceedings of Omnipotence in the creation of the universe"; at miracles, shrines, indulgences, monks and cardinals; at popes, who in the "riches, honors, jurisdictions, offices" they covet and the "ceremonies. . . excommunications and interdicts" they indulge in, have lost all resemblance to the Apostles they are supposed to represent.
Perhaps Erasmus' greatest accomplishment—and certainly the one that had the broadest ramifications—was his compilation of the early Greek Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, which he published in 1516 together with a new Latin translation of his own.
For its challenge to orthodoxy, the work electrified the theological world as soon as it appeared.
PROTESTANT ENGLAND'S BIBLES, from William Tyndaie's pioneering vernacular translation of 1525-1535 to the eloquent King James Bible of 1611, drew on a rapidly expanding body of translations and scholarly editions—many edited by Catholics like Erasmus. But most influential was the vigorous, direct language that Tyndale had written in the hope that even "a boy that driveth the plow" could understand the Scriptures.
Drawing praise from the humanists and latent reformers, and merciless attack from others. Luther used Erasmus' text when he lectured to his students at Wittenberg, and when he translated the Bible into German, it was from Erasmus' Bible that he worked. In England William Tyndale, an English admirer of Erasmus, used the same version when he translated the Bible into English—and Tyndale's version was, in turn, the cornerstone of the King James Version. Whether they used Erasmus' Bible or not, men all over Europe carried Erasmus' idea a step further, and before the century was over they had translated the Bible into almost every language of Europe.
Indeed, a veritable fever for translation overtook Europe in the 16th Century. It was not confined to the Bible, but extended as well to philosophical treatises, poetry, histories and plays.
John Calvin was the first to write a scholarly treatise in a modern language, fde originally wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion in Latin— in order, he said, that it might reach the learned of all lands. Five years later, wishing to reach the faithful among his countrymen, he translated it into French. Calling on his training in logic and law, he wrote in a style that was simple and direct, and he initiated the lucidity that to this day characterizes the French language.
The next step was to write in French to begin with. This practice was not actually a product of the 16th Century; the French had been writing poetry, romances and comic tales in their own language since medieval times. But with the influx of Renaissance ideals from Italy, the French began to graft classic rhetoric and vocabulary onto their own language, and to use French, thus fortified, for serious subjects. Once this began to happen, France witnessed an upwelling of literary activity, combining both medieval and Renaissance elements. The movement culminated in the lusty works of one of the
Great figures in French literature, Francois Rabelais.
Rabelais was born about 1494, in Touraine, the son of a well-to-do lawyer who placed Francois in a Franciscan monastery when he was about 17. Even as an adolescent he exhibited a voracious curiosity and a boisterous spirit that the monastery could not contain. He detested the ignorance and simplicity of the monks who were his companions, and he studied the classics with such fervor that he was urged by his superiors to desist; when he did not, he was confined to his cell and deprived of his books. He subsequently left monastic life and roved through France and Italy, dabbling in this and that; by the time he reached his middle years he had done turns as a monk, a secular priest, a physician and an editor, and had acquired a vast store of knowledge that ranged over law, theology, history, botany, anatomy, astronomy, mythology and cuisine.
In the 1530s an anonymous author committed to print the tales of a legendary folk hero common to many areas of France, a benevolent giant named Gargantua, who had an appetite for food, women and derring-do commensurate with his oversized body. Rabelais may have been the author of this work; whether he was or not, the thought struck him that of this little volume "more copies would be sold in two months than people would buy Bibles in nine years," and so he turned to composing a fanciful tale about the giant's son, Pantagruel. He later went back to pick up Gargantua and even his ancestors, and the work was eventually expanded to five volumes.
In Rabelais' version Gargantua is a philosopher-king who reigns over a state for which Rabelais took his inspiration from Plato's Republic. The son, Pantagruel, reflecting the growth of learning and contemporary reverence for it, outdoes his father in erudition and ability.
One of the book's major characters is a jolly monk. Friar John, through whom Rabelais satirizes
All the charges that the reformers leveled against the monks—their indolence, greed, lust and lack of attention to prayer. “I never sleep soundly but when 1 am at sermon or prayers," says Friar John, and "we begin our morning prayers with coughing, and supper with drinking."
But Rabelais was no Protestant reformer; he gave only tepid approval to Luther, and he mocked Calvin as "the mad devil. . . the impostor of Geneva." Ridiculing the religious certainties of the day, he defined God as "that intellectual sphere the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." Yet time and again he stated his belief in the basic principles of Christianity, and he remained a Catholic until he died.
The tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel illustrate the confrontation of humanistic scholarship with medieval ways and customs. On the one hand the tales are an indictment of social evils, on the other hand they indicate a rollicking acceptance of man as he is. All Rabelais' ideas are cloaked in bawdiness and buffoonery, with no restraints on hyperbole or invective. Every aspect of life was for him an object of laughter.
Because the book was obscene and satirized monks and their ways it was immediately condemned by the University of Paris, and Parlement forbade its sale. That did not prevent France (including Francis I and some of the clergy) from reading it; all five volumes circulated widely.
Rabelais did not philosophize as such; he did not argue or defend opinions; he only presented men and women, good and evil, as he found them, and made them all the objects of mirth. He could be scornful, but only of sham and lying. Like Erasmus, he rejected the Protestants because of their contentiousness, their condemnation of free will and their disregard for the intellect. "Free men," he wrote, "well born, well educated, conversant in honest company, have by nature an. . . impulse which always pushes them to do the good and to withdraw from vice." This was the antithesis of the reformers' view, which was that man was essentially sinful. Rabelais' solutions for the evils of the time were education and joie de vivre.
The works of Rabelais are a boisterous and confusing array of the ideas current in 16th Century France. In striking contrast to his work is that of his countryman Montaigne, a gentler man who like Rabelais drew on the classics, but whose writings are marked by calm and order.
Montaigne was born Michel Eyquem, in 1533, of a recently ennobled family. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne, was a Catholic and mayor of Bordeaux, his mother a descendant of Spanish Marranos. From his babyhood Michel was taught by a German tutor who knew no French and who was bidden by the father to speak only Latin to the child. He was later to say, "1 was over six before I understood any more French. . . than Arabic," and not until he went to school did he consort with boys of his own age. These two facts were to leave their marks on him the rest of his life.
As a young man he embarked on a career in government and served for a time as court counselor and magistrate of Bordeaux. But Montaigne was a man of contemplation rather than one of action; he shunned controversy and shrank from what he called "the slavery of. . . public duties." In 1571, at the age of 38, he withdrew to his chateau in Bordeaux and devoted most of the rest of his life to solitary reading and writing. There in a study where he claimed to have 1,000 books, and where the ceiling was carved with Greek and Latin inscriptions—among them Terence's "I am a man; I consider nothing human foreign to me"—he pondered the meaning of life and invented the essay, which was to become one of the most fashionable genres of Western literature.
THIS SWEET ANCESTRAL RETREAT" Montaigne called his quiet castle on a Bordeaux hilltop, where he retired to seek peace and detachment. Here, despite civil war and marauding neighbors, he wrote his philosophical “Essays."
The essay, from the French word essayer, to attempt, was a descriptive piece that might deal with any topic from a subjective point of view. The essays were attempts to probe humanity as Montaigne saw it, and they were intensely personal. Of them he said, "1 speak to paper as I do to the first person I meet."
The essay was short; it might ramble but it did not sprawl, and it was neither argumentative nor critical. Like Rabelais, Montaigne accepted the world as it was, but whereas Rabelais wrote in a spirit of bawdy merriment, Montaigne wrote in one of contemplation, and sometimes melancholy. Yet pleasure was the chief aim of man, he believed —though reason must keep him from enslavement to nature—and death ought not to be feared.
Like Rabelais, Montaigne looked with skepticism on the religious certainties of the day. He believed that the laws of conscience proceed from custom, not from God, and that whatever men are accustomed to believe they hold to be incontrovertible. But "nothing is certain but uncertainty," he said, and "nothing seems true that may not seem false."
It was largely because of ideas like this that the Reformation could not take hold in France. Montaigne, too, remained a Catholic throughout the turmoil of the Reformation, and thousands were influenced by him and by other French intellectuals who wrote with humanistic optimism about man.
Almost as engrossing as religion in the 16th Century was the subject of political power, and men of all persuasions grappled with its principles. The first to develop a theory of statecraft was Niccolo Machiavelli, a diplomat who turned to writing after an arrested career in government.
Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, of an old Tuscan family. He served for 13 years as Secretary to the Chancery of Florence, helping to shape policy at home and traveling on missions to the King of France, the Pope and the Emperor
Maximilian. The government he served was overthrown in 1512, and Machiavelli was exiled by the new rulers.
In bitter disillusionment, he then lived a lonely and frugal life in the country, where his only solace was his books. “When evening comes," he wrote, “I. . . go into my study. Before I enter I take off my rough mud-stained country dress. I put on my royal and curial robes and thus fittingly attired I enter into the assembly of men of old times. ... I dare to talk with them, and ask them the reason for their actions. Of their kindness they answer me. . . . From these notes I have composed a little work. The Prince."
The Prince was a dissertation on political rationalism in which Machiavelli set forth the thesis that practical politics is divorced from ethics. Machiavelli believed that all men are governed by selfinterest; that they are ungrateful, inconstant, false and avaricious; and that the ruler, to be effective, must appeal to these motives.
The Prince therefore glorified the qualities of the lion and the fox, of force and slyness. A prince, Machiavelli said, "cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity and against religion. And, therefore, he must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and [must if necessary] be able to do evil."
This was a novel assertion at the time, for men reared on the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had since the Middle Ages linked governing and ethics together. Philosophers almost universally condemned the book for its bitter cynicism and its appeal to dissimulation, but rulers grasped at it. Charles V, Catherine de' Medici, Henry III and Henry IV, and William of Orange all possessed the book and probably studied it; and even Queen Elizabeth practiced its principles. The book was read all over Europe, and within 75 years the word "Machiavellian" had entered the speech of Italy, England, France and Spain. Elizabethan dramatists, while professing to loathe Machiavellian principles, were fascinated by them. One of Shakespeare's characters, Richard of Gloucester, boasts villainously in Henry VI (Part HI) that he can "change shapes with Proteus for advantages/And set the murderous Machiavel to school." And Elizabethan audiences hooted and applauded when the tavern keeper asked in The Merry Wives of Windsor, "Am I subtle? Am I a Machiavel?"
If Machiavelli gave political theory a name for evil, a more trusting man gave it a name for idealism. That was Sir Thomas More, the English statesman whom Henry VIII beheaded for his refusal to take the King's Oath of Supremacy. For both Machiavelli and More the end of the state was the well-being of its citizens, but More believed that reasonable men could build a just society without having recourse to the amoral expediency of Machiavelli.
More was distressed by the upheaval of his time and its effects on both the state and the Church, and like Erasmus, he was kind but caustic, urbane but devout, and blessed with a gift for whimsy.
His book Utopia purports to be a conversation between himself and an imaginary traveler, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who had visited the New World. Traveling into the wilderness Hythlodaeus had discovered the marvelous land of Utopia (from the Greek for "no place"), where men lived in peace and harmony, with a pervading sense of brotherhood and without the corruption of gold or private property; where all were educated; where everyone worked and no one idled; where justice was designed to end the vice, not to destroy the criminal.
Through the character Hythlodaeus (whose name means "skilled in nonsense") More offered a biting
UTOPIA, Thomas More's mythical island of preace and harmony, is depricled in a mapr from the 1518 edition of More's fanciful critique. Si. frts on garlands identify its caprital, Arnaurote (center), and the source and mouth of its river, Anyder
Satire of the ills of European society. The inhabitants of the New World were depicted as living in a state of primeval, natural virtue—a virtue that had been corrupted in European civilization. The idea of the noble savage, which was to take revolutionary effect more than 200 years later, was not remote from Thomas More's idea. For the form of the Utopian state More was indebted to Plato's Republic; for the conversation with Hythlodaeus, to Plato's Dialogues; and for the setting, to the published correspondence of Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci was the Italian navigator who charted the New World and gave it his name; his account of his voyage was widely read and did much to pique Europeans' interest in the Western Hemisphere.
No country of that era benefited more from foreign adventure than did Spain, whose lead in exploration yielded literature as well as wealth. The descriptions by conquistadors of the exotic lands and strange new civilizations they had found prompted the nation's scholars to write historical accounts of the American conquest. Still other Spaniards wrote histories of Spain and scientific treatises, in a spirit of remarkable detachment, and that attitude carried over into the theater and narrative fiction, bringing on a Golden Age of literature that was to influence all the rest of Europe. A Spanish playwright was the first to apply to the stage the ideas of the romance ballad, thus helping to found drama that glorified the nation. Another Spaniard was among the first to focus on the everyday affairs and the hopes and fears of the common people (as opposed to the deeds of kings and national heroes), thus laying the groundwork for the modern novel.
The most brilliant star in a whole galaxy of great writers was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Cervantes, son of an impoverished surgeon, had an uncommonly checkered career that included work as steward to a prelate in Rome; military service
Under a duke of Austria, from which he emerged wounded and maimed; slavery in Moslem Algiers; and imprisonment for debt in Spain.
He was one of the few men of letters of his time who was not formally educated in the classics; he was known to his contemporaries as el ingenio lego, "the lay genius." He was, however, familiar with the popular courtly romances that had entertained the literate since medieval times.
After his release from Algerian captivity and his return to Spain, Cervantes tried writing, but success was slow to come. He wanted to write drama, but he could not earn a living at it. So he took a job as purchasing agent for the navy, in which capacity he provided some of the stores for the ill-fated Armada when it sailed against England. After being arrested for irregularities in his accounts, he was sent to jail, and there, when he was nearly 60, he began what he fancied would be a short story satirizing the popular chivalric romances. When he was done, Cervantes had written one of the most famous novels in all literature, Don Quixote.
Don Quixote is a self-styled knight-errant who sets forth with his servant, Sancho Panza, to battle dragons and evil men, to right injustice, to defend the oppressed and protect the innocent—and he makes a grand nuisance of himself by rescuing beautiful ladies from circumstances they do not wish to be liberated from and by tilting with innocent bystanders whom he takes to be mischievous knights. He dreams of an ideal past, when there was no greed, when all was love and friendship in the world, when "those two fatal words, thine and mine, were distinctions unknown."
The book is a vast panorama of human society, and the master and his servant are the antitheses of human character: the one courtly and blissfully foolish, the other unlettered but wise; the one trying valiantly to be brave and unselfish in a world that does not live by those ideals, the other shrug-
LONDON'S SWAN THEATER, largest of the Elizabethan playhouses, stood beyond the city limits on the disreputable south bank of the Thames (top). According to a visiting Dutchman who sketched its circular interior (bottom), 3,000 spectators could squeeze into the Swan's galleries and the pit around its stage.
Ging off the absurdities of life with worldly wise peasant proverbs.
Cervantes had been beset all his life by tribulations, yet his spirit survived unbowed. He could plumb the human soul without Machiavellian bitterness, and be compassionate without being sentimental. He dignified the human spirit even as he made fun of its plight, and he made heroism out of man's aspirations in the face of harsh reality.
Don Quixote was an immediate success in Spain and abroad—it was quickly pirated and translated into all the major languages of Europe—and Cervantes found himself so much in demand by both patrons and publishers that he was able to devote the rest of his life to writing.
By that time Spain's Golden Age was waning. She had lost her grip on the Netherlands, and the ships of her famous navy had suffered a crippling defeat when Philip 11, in a historic miscalculation, moved his Armada against England. Spain gave up her supremacy on the seas and lost a part of her foothold in the New World; in a century she began also to lose her distinction in arts and letters.
In England, on the other hand, the defeat of the Spanish Armada swelled an already bursting national pride. While Spain declined, England awoke to a millennium of letters.
Nearly three quarters of a century had passed since Thomas More and his circle had graced English scholarship with classical learning. By this time England had achieved a finer synthesis of the classical with the new than had been accomplished anywhere else. More than a Renaissance, it was a birth of native and original culture.
Like the Italian Renaissance that seeded it, Elizabethan literature celebrated individual man, but it also celebrated the nation-state. Edmund Spenser, a diplomatic aide whose service to the government of England in Ireland won him a castle and 3,000 acres of land in Cork, wrote The Faerie Queene as a stately national allegory dedicated to "the most High, Mightie and Magnificent Empresse" Elizabeth. Dozens of other poets and dramatists—John Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe—joined in a proud chorus of nationalism and enthusiasm for humankind. Out of their ranks came the man who is the greatest writer in the English language, and perhaps the greatest in any—William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was born in 1564, the son of a prosperous businessman in Stratford-on-Avon. At some time in his youth he left Stratford for London, where he took a menial job in the theater. Soon he was acting small parts. By 1591, when he was not yet 30, he was writing plays, and a year later one of the popular playwrights of the day warned his colleagues that they were being threatened in the London theater by "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac fotum [Jack-of-all-trades], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey."
It would be an injustice to Shakespeare to limit him to his time, for the works of this singular genius transcend time and place; even in his era Ben Jonson perceived that he was "not of an age, but for all time." Nevertheless, he was conditioned by the milieu in which he emerged, and he echoes the diverse ideas of that era: the enthusiasm for man, the soaring national pride, the material affluence, excitement over the classics.
Hamlet voices Renaissance exuberance when he says, "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! ... in apprehension how like a god! ' So does Miranda in The Tempest when she exclaims, "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That hath such people in't!"
Even the ideas that characterized the Reformation got a few nods of acknowledgment. Shakespeare's King John (though he makes no mention of Magna Carta) voices words that might have been uttered three centuries after his time by Henry VIII, when he declares that "no Italian priest/ Shall tithe or toll in our dominions."
The concern with Scripture, and the endless discussion about what truth was to be discerned therein, is parodied in Hamlet by the two clowning gravediggers.
First Clown: ... There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers. They hold up Adam's profession.
Second Clown: Was he a gentleman?
First: 'A was the first that ever bore arms.
Second: Why, he had none.
First: What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms?
And nationalism is celebrated in the many references to England—
. . . this scepter'd isle.
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-Paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war.
The growing secularism and concern with man on earth, which had already been made manifest in the realm of politics, had its literary culmination in Elizabethan drama, when the passions, energies and ambitions of men enamored of life supplanted concern with the hereafter. There continued to be a struggle between good and evil—a struggle that filled men's hearts with terror—but now it reflected more the vainglory of life than damnation in the hereafter. Medieval men had always looked backward, to a lost Eden that could be regained only when earthly life was ended; curiosity about the material world was subordinated to concern with a world to come. The reformers had looked backward, too, for the restoration of purity in religion; but in bringing attention to man's moral behavior they had brought the focus closer to the present. Now, in the dawn of the 17th Century, men were filled with a yearning for knowledge. They sat up to watch the spectacle of life, which had suddenly turned into an unpredictable suspense drama. This was behind the Elizabethan fascination with the stage.
Like so many cultural revolutions, that of the 16th Century ended by burying the very tools that had set it in motion. An acquaintance with Greek and a re-examination of Latin had brought it about; in the end the classical languages were overtaken by the vernaculars. In 1482, one year before the birth of Luther, the Greek scholar Argyropoulos of Constantinople remarked with satisfaction that "Greece has crossed the Alps." Hardly more than a century later, Ben Jonson praised Shakespeare as "soul of the age. . . though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek."
The age had begun with Luther's simple directness; it culminated in Shakespeare's psychological discernment. It had begun with polemics in learned Latin; it culminated in the rise of the modern vernacular literatures. One of Luther's major innovations had been a denial of clerical privileges and an assertion of the priesthood of all believers. Much the same transfer of privilege had come about in literature. When the Reformation era ended, letters were no longer limited to scholars; they had gone out to the people.
ON THE PRODUCTION LINE, printers set type (left) while an apprentice (center) stacks printed sheets. The man at rear inks type at a second press.
World History
