1000 word essay due tonight 11:00pm eastern time

Units/Unit 2/The Northern Renaissance.html

2: Intellectual Change from the 15th to 17th Century

The Northern Renaissance

After beginning in Italy, the Renaissance slowly spread North throughout Europe during the fifteenth century.  The Renaissance spirit and ideals traveled through books, trade, the Church, royal courts, and scholars and students, resulting in what is known as the Northern Renaissance.  While the Northern Renaissance retained most of the characteristics of the Renaissance in Italy, it was a little different.  The main difference was that the north was much more concerned with religion.  The emphasis on religion can be seen in the artwork produced in the north during the Renaissance.  With this focus on religion, the humanist tradition was altered when it reached the north where it became known as Christian Humanism.

Northern Europe had a much greater concern for theology, which made the Renaissance into a movement of moral and religious reform.  It was not a search for new guidelines to direct a secular life, but for a foundation from which to reform and improve the Christian religion.  Christian Humanists had a desire to combine the classic learning of the Greeks and Romans with the ideals of Christianity.  As with humanists generally, those in the North still believed human nature to be good and placed much emphasis on the use of reason for understanding life and even religion.  It was the human intellect that could bring about moral and institutional reform.  Many northern Humanists set out to discover lost works of early Church writers.  While Petrarch looked for works by the pagan philosopher Cicero, these northerners wanted to find writings by church fathers and popes. 

The leading Christian Humanist was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who is known as the Prince of the Humanists.  Erasmus engaged in many scholarly projects during his lifetime.  One was to create a more accurate version of the New Testament.  The standard Christian Bible of his day was the Vulgate Bible, translated and compiled by St. Jerome.  Following typical Humanist ideals, Erasmus believed that there were many errors in this Bible which is what motivated him to try to revise it.  He went back to ancient texts and in 1516, produced a new and what he believed to be a more accurate translation of the New Testament.  His most important work was The Praise of Folly, published in 1509.  Using satire, this book mocked the Catholic Church for its many problems and became very popular.  Erasmus saw the problems in the Church through his study of the Bible and hoped they could be repaired.  However, he never tried to separate from the Catholic Church.  He considered himself a devout Catholic and simply wanted to fix the problems that were wrong within the Church.  Others who would soon follow Erasmus were not so willing to stay within the Church.