This summary is taken from a book titled The Dawn of a New Era 1250-1435 written by Edward P. Cheney, the first book in the 20-volume historical series The Rise of Modern Europe. The original copyright was in 1936; this particular copy is dated 1971, so the monetary figures in �modern value� are not accurate.
Language, Literature and Art
The years of the 13th to 15th century were replete with great changes in language, literature and art and are the roots of art and literature of the modern world.
The languages of Europe were approaching their permanent form. Almost all written production was in the vernacular of each country. Of literature and learning the culture of Greece and Rome were more carefully studied and more widely disseminated, ensuring its survival. Art was experiencing a new and rapid development.
A change in the mental attitude of the more thoughtful classes, broader and more critical, became one of the characteristics of all later intellectual life.
The Prevalence of Latin and French
At the opening of this period Latin was still entrenched as the written language in the universities, the church, law, government, diplomacy and records. French too was almost an international language, spoken and written throughout Europe, even in Italy and Germany, and due to the Crusades it was even spoken in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the east.
The Rise of Modern English
Due to the Norman and Angevin conquests, other invasions and out of literary fashion French was spoken as much as English was in England. But the mass of the people spoke English, even those whose habit was to speak French.
From the mid 13th century the use of written and conversational English rose rapidly. The Provisions of Oxford (1258) were composed in French and Latin, but the copies that were circulated around England were in English. The king, ministers and the upper classes began to speak English more often, a common language with the common people. In 1295 Edward I appealed to the patriotism of his subjects by charging that the king of France was �threatening to destroy the English language from the face of the earth.� When a representative of the king urged Parliament of 1377 to approve his invasion of France he spoke in English �to the end that he might be better understood by all.�
Certain privileges granted from the King to London were explained in English to the city council. In 1362, on the petition of the city of London, a statute was passed requiring all pleadings and judgments in all courts in England to be in the English tongue, since French �is much unknown in the said realm.� In the same year and almost regularly thereafter Parliament was opened by the chancellor in an English speech. The Parliamentary deposition of Richard II in 1399 and his renunciation were read in English and Latin, �so that all might understand�; and Henry IV made his claim to the throne in English.
By mid 14th century English was the native language of all classes. Students at the universities and novices in the monasteries would break the rules by using English, when by the statutes they ought to have spoke Latin in their more formal conversations and French during leisure hours. Text-books in English for the study of French shows that the upper and middle classes spoke English as their mother tongue, and soon after the middle of the century boys in the grammar schools construed their Latin by means of English, not of French.
When the Black Death claimed victims from the monasteries and vicarages they were replaced by members of the middle class that spoke English not French, and little Latin. When the middle class rose to prosperity and political recognition, and the lower class attained their freedom they took the English language with them.
The progress of the written word was slower. French had come into use in records along with Latin early in the 13th century and by the 14th predominated over it. The statute that required the use of English in the courts was written in French and provided that judgments should be enrolled in Latin. The Rolls of Parliament and the records of the king�s council are in French, Latin and English, with English in the majority by 1450. Early in the 15th century private letters, wills, town and guild ordinances appeared occasionally in English.
English had been aided by a national literature. Early 14th century saw native writing in English and the two other languages were being translated into English. Also in English were Wyclif and his companion�s sermons, tracts and translations, the poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, and towards the end of the century Chaucer�s Canterbury Tales. By mid 15th century the change was complete.
The Use of Spanish in Records and Literature
Spain�s development of a national language was similar to England�s, with its use by the middle classes in the cortes and in the official documents in the common speech of Castile, rather than the customary Latin. The Treaty of Cabrera in 1206 was written in this language.
The general change to this language can be traced to the reign in Alfonso X (1252-1284). After his ascension he ordered all public documents formerly issued in Latin should be published in the popular language. Latin was reserved for foreign correspondence, although Castilian was regularly used.
The first translation of the old Visigothic code from Latin to Castilian began in the reign of Alfonso�s father and was completed in Alfonso�s time. His Mirror of Rights and Code Royal were issued in Castilian in the earliest years of his reign, and his great digest of the laws, Los Siete Partidas (�the Seven Divisions�), one of the greatest of all codes was also drawn up in Castilian and completed in 1265.
Popular chronicles and literature such as the Gran Conquista de Ultramar, a history of the Crusades, the General Chronicle of Spain, the Chronicle of the Cid, a prose about that popular hero, and the Bible were all translated.
Ballads of 14th century Spain were in the native tongue, maybe even thousands of poems about Alexander, Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers and the conflict with the Moors. The influence of the Arabic language and literature is present; �Woe is me, Alhama� is the refrain of both a Castilian and Moorish song. The 15th century was not as prolific, but in the allegories and sonnets, the first Spanish drama in 1414, and the chronicle literature and legislative record helped establish Castilian as the official and literary language of Spain.
French of Paris
French as a national language took its own course. It began as a language only spoken that had to be put to writing, and complicating matters was that different regions had their own particular speech and one had to be selected over the others. As late as the mid 13th century each neighborhood had its own dialect. In 1260, Roger Bacon remarked that the speech of the Normans, the Picards and Burgundians was so different that what was said quite properly in the language of one shocked the inhabitants of another.
The great distinction was between the north and the south, the langue d�oil and the langue d�oc. Even in Languedoc Provencal and Limousin or Catalan must be distinguished. To the north were the Picard, Burgundian, Norman, the Walloon, the dialect of the Lorraine, the Dialect of the French Comte, of Champagne, of Anjou and, above all, that of the old duchy of France, of which Paris was the capital.
These dialects were not merely patois [local speech]. Some had their literary as well as their spoken forms of the old romance common to the whole country. The troubadours made Provencal famous before Simon Montfort, in the beginning of the 13th century, obliterated the Albigenses and the entire south. Both epic and lyric poetry, the romances of the Round Table, and translations from the Latin, were familiar in the east and northeast; there were poems in the language of Artois and poetry in the Anglo-Norman dialect that existed on both sides of the Channel.
But the language of Paris was already becoming classical French, due to its preeminence since the 11th century by the presence of the king and the court. Government documents were in Latin; the chancery a direct descendant of the Roman imperial administration, its language permeated with Latin and Roman conceptions.
The earliest use of French in Parisian government documents dates to 1254 concerning the vassalage of the Duke of Brittany. Then in 1259 a treaty with the King of England was signed. During the 14th century French rose to predominate over Latin in official use in Paris and throughout the kingdom. By mid 15th century only church records, correspondence with the popes, and an occasional treaty or ordinance were written in Latin.
This practice was by the upper classes, the Parisian court being a social, literary and political center. Paris was the principal residence of the king and his relatives, the gathering place for the nobility and the officials, the source of patronage for authors, the location of the most famous university of Europe.
The interest and wide dissemination of the native language of France can be dated early. The long narratives in verse of the 12th century, including both the Brut and the Rou; record keeping and historical prose from the 13th century to the 15th all gave rise to the national language. The great mass of early French literature, the chansons de geste, �songs of exploits�, romances, the fabliaux, the lyric poetry, the miracle and mystery plays, the chronicles, and above all the Roman de la Rose, the most popular poem of its age, were by 1450 familiar throughout France, England, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany.
Dante and the Italian Vernacular
The rapid development, the beauty, the widespread influence of the Italian language, its achievements in literature and its accompaniments in art, all tend to obscure its relatively late appearance as a recognized vernacular. In Dante�s essay De Vulgari Eloquentia (�Concerning the Common Speech�), written in Latin circa 1305, the author surveyed the various dialects of Italy and denied to all them, even to Tuscan, the honor of being that �illustrious Italian vulgar tongue� in which the highest poetry should be composed by the worthiest writers. But already in the early part of the 13th century a whole school of poets, the �Sicilians,� (named from their connection with the court of Frederick, King of Naples and Sicily), had written in a mixed but flexible Italian dialect. Dante himself spoke in the Convito of the Italian �precious mother tongue,� and condemned those who, to seem learned, used Provencal or some other foreign speech.
In his sonnets and canzoni Dante had already written graceful poetry, and in the Vita Nuova (�The New Life�) good clear prose, in a language which, although possibly, as he claims, composite or selective, was in the main the language of Tuscany. Other poets from around Italy were all using Tuscan and were busy polishing it and purifying it into the dolce stil nuovo, the �sweet new fashion� which soon came to Italian. The impress that Dante placed on this new language by his poetry was perhaps his greatest achievement.
Except for this and his influence in placing a high valuation on poetry there is little reason to consider Dante a forerunner of modern times. Concerning religion, the church, the empire, of philosophy, he belongs with the age that was passing away. Born in Florence in 1265 of an old aristocratic but not wealthy family, Dante was exiled in 1302 as the result of a political feud. He wandered from one of the petty courts of the rising princely families of Italy to another, studied for a time at Bologna and perhaps at Paris, read, meditated and wrote. His character was somber and remote and his career was a tragedy. All his works have been relegated to obscurity due to his Divine Comedy. He died in 1321, still an exile. Fifty years after his death certain citizens of Florence had a man appointed yearly to lecture on Dante�s famous book. One of the lecturers was Giovanni Boccaccio, who gave his first lecture in the Church of St. Stephen in 1373.
Boccaccio and the Decameron
Boccaccio was an old man in poor health and after a few months he suspended his lectures. He died two years later in 1375. He was the author of a work that portrayed the world as being devoid of all religious sense that knew nothing of guilt or penitence or divine retribution. His work was the Decameron.
Boccaccio was a Florentine, although a wanderer. Born in 1313, he would later learn bookkeeping, looking towards his business career. He then was sent to Naples to get further training among the Florentine merchants. Without interest in business he studied law and then literature. At Naples, at the court of King Robert, he studied at the university poetry, literature and art.
In 1346 he returned to Florence and sought a livelihood, knowledge and adventure there, in other Italian towns and even in Avignon. In mid life he settled in Florence, became wealthy and was elected a member of the cities� governing council, and divided the remainder of his life between public appointments and literary interests, composing poems and compiling classical, medieval and mythological lore.
The Decameron was written between 1350 and 1354. Surviving official condemnation and unofficial disapproval it became a classic. Taking place during an eight-month period in 1348 during the Black Plague it reduced the civilized life of Florence to barbarism, contrasting the horror of the city to the to the ease and luxury of the villas about Fiesole, where four young women and three young men have taken refuge from the epidemic, telling stories to pass the time.
Petrarch and Knowledge of the Classics
Italian literature and especially the interest in the classics were due to Francesco Petrarca (1304-1375). Born in Arezzo, Petrarch, at age 17, was taken to Avignon, the residence city of the popes and a gathering-place for Italian exiles, bankers, ecclesiastics and literary men. He was educated at Carpentras and the University of Montpellier and, like most scholars, took lower orders in the church. With friends in the papal court he lived a life of relative ease. Like Dante he was a critic of wicked churchmen, but not of the church itself.
Petrarch traveled throughout Italy, France, Flanders, Germany and Switzerland throughout most of his 70 years of life. Famous for his talents he had hosts among kings, princes, popes, cardinals, bishops, noblemen and scholars. In 1340 he was offered the grant of the laurel crown from the University of Paris and from Rome, accepting the (temporary) crown from Rome the following year.
While gaining fame as a poet, Petrarch amassed a large collection of ancient manuscripts, making copies of writers such as Vergil, Cicero, Servius Statius, Horace, Seneca, Boethius, Livy, Florus, Sallust, Suetonius, Macrobius, Ovid, Juvenal, Lucian and Plato. When Petrarch died he was reading an excerpt from one of the letters of Cicero to Atticus.
Humanism
The addiction to the study of Greek and Roman writers came to be known as humanism. Florence was as prominent in the classics as it was in literature, advanced by three successive chancellors of the Signory; Collucio Salutai, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini from circa 1375 to circa 1453. Students of the ancients and writers in Latin when possible, they also collected manuscripts. There were also classical scholars at Rome. Poggio, as the pope�s secretary, traveled to Constance, Paris and London finding long forgotten works of Statius, Lucretius and Quintillian, as well as twelve of the comedies of Plautus.
Searches were taken place in cathedral and monastic libraries and in obscure repositories. The Florentine Niccoli spent his whole fortune in finding and purchasing books and manuscripts of Cicero, Lucretius, Pliny and others. Guarino of Verona, during a visit to the east, retrieved fifty Greek manuscripts in 1408. Aurispa, from Sicily, brought more than 200 manuscripts to Venice in 1423. Filefo, as secretary of the Venetian legation in 1420, was sent to Constantinople where he obtained copies of the works of some forty Greek authors. Cardinal Bessarion spent 30,000 gold florins to purchase about 600 manuscripts of early writers and donated the to St. Mark�s in Venice.
There were whole companies of copyists in the larger and more literary cities. There are few of the classical or early Christian writings, which we now possess, that were not already in one or other of the collections in Italy by 1450.
Long before the mid 15th century Italian scholars, to better understand Latin though and expression, were reading Greek literature in its original form. Greek scholars taught in Italy, Italians studied in Constantinople and there were numerous translations from Greek to Latin.
From 1297 humanism made its way into the universities. Under the head of rhetoric, the language, the literature and matters dealt with in the ancient literature were alike lectured upon. There were some opposition, however, as many felt that the harkening to the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome were a menace to Christian ideals.
New Movements in Art
The excellence of 15th century art can be traced back to Giotto in the 14th century, a Florentine who was a companion of Dante. The artists of that time were artisans, the more successful were masters with workshops, and others were journeymen and apprentices. These artists needed patronage from men involved in manufacturing, commerce and finance. The Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Spinelli, the Baroncelli and other banking families in Florence, the Tolomei in Siena, commissioned painters to decorate chapels for them in the principal churches, and many individual merchants, like Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, ordered the execution of those triptychs and other paintings in which sacred scenes are made the occasion for painting admirable portraits of the donors. Similarly Felix Brancacci of Florence in his will left money to construct and decorate in the church of the Carmine, that chapel which has ever since given testimony to the skill of Masolina and the genius of Masaccio.
Even the despised earnings of usury might be turned to artistic uses, as in the case of Reginaldo Scrovegno, whom Dante saw in a rain of fire in the Inferno, but whose son Enrico engaged Giovanni Pisano to build the little church of St. Mary of the Sands in Padua and Giotto to fill it with some of the earliest and greatest products of his genius.
City governments also spent money on public buildings and churches, hiring painters from different regions. Duccio, Simone, Pietro and Ambrozzio Lorenzetti adorned the cathedral and Palazzo Pubblico at Siena in the 14th century.
The pope, prelates and monastic orders also were patrons of the arts, having churches and convents built or rebuilt with carved pulpits, altar pieces, screens and shrines, and hired painters to decorate walls with pictures. Art was flourishing elsewhere in Europe at the time with examples of painting and sculpture to be seen in Flanders, Burgundy and France.
In the 15th century princes and kings were the most generous when it came to the support of the arts, as the scholars and popular artists surrounded the princes of Italy who became their patrons. But Cosimo Medici (1389-1464) gave more than anyone else. Churches and convents were constructed, furnished, decorated and endowed at his expense, and chapels were built and beautified in the older churches. He built for himself the Riccardi palace in the Via Larga and his four summer residences. He collected and copied great numbers of manuscripts. He also secured office and support for painters, architects and men of learning. After a lull in production it was well into the 15th century under patrons like Cosimo de Medici that art and literature resumed their progress.