Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

The schools of England suffered even more than those of Germany from

the religious overturn. Cathedral, monastic, guild, and chantry

schools melted away in the heat of the attack upon ecclesiastical

abuses and wealth. Most university students had been sent up by

those schools; this flow ceasing, Oxford graduated only 173

bachelors of arts, Cambridge only 191, in 1548; in 1547 and 1550

Oxford had no such graduates at all. `063511 Henry VIII felt the

problem, but his need of funds for war or weddings limited him to

establishing Trinity College, Cambridge (1546), and financing regius

professorships in divinity, Hebrew, Greek, medicine, and law.

Private philanthropy in this period founded Corpus Christi College,

Christ Church College, St. John's College, and Trinity College at

Oxford, and Magdalen College at Cambridge. The royal commission sent

by Cromwell to Oxford and Cambridge (1535) to appropriate their

charters and endowments for the King brought both faculty and

curriculum under governmental control. The reign of Scholasticism in

England was summarily ended; the works of Duns Scotus were literally

scattered to the winds; `063512 Canon law was set aside; Greek and

Latin studies were encouraged; the curriculum was largely secularized.

But dogmatism remained. A law of 1553 required all candidates for

degrees to subscribe to the Anglican Articles of Religion.

In Catholic France and Flanders the universities declined not in

endowments or enrollments but in vigor and freedom of intellectual

life. New universities were opened at Reims, Douai, Lille, and

Besancon. The University of Louvain rivaled that of Paris in number of

students (5,000), and in defense of an orthodoxy that even the popes

found extreme. The University of Paris had a large enrollment (6,000),

but it no longer attracted foreign students in any considerable

number, or tolerated, as in its thirteenth-century prime, the

quickening ferment of new ideas. Its other faculties were so dominated

by that of theology- the Sorbonne- that this name became almost a

synonym for the university. The curriculum of theology and

expurgated classics seemed to Montaigne a superficial routine of

memorizing and conformity. Rabelais never tired of satirizing the

scholastic formalities and logical gymnastics of the Sorbonne, the

waste of student years in debates carefully removed from actual

concern with human life. "I am willing to lose my share of

paradise," vowed Clement Marot, "if those great beasts"- the

professors- "did not ruin my youth." `063513 All the power and

authority of the university were turned not only against the French

Protestants but against the French humanists as well.

Francis I, who had drunk the wine of Italy, and had met churchmen

steeped in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, did his best

to protect French scholarship from the conservative discouragements

emanating from the Sorbonne. Urged on by Guillaume Bude, Cardinal Jean

du Bellay, and the indefatigable Marguerite, he provided funds to

establish (1529), independently of the university, a school devoted

predominantly to humanistic studies. Four "royal professors" were

initially appointed- two for Greek, two for Hebrew; and chairs of

Latin, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy were presently added.

Tuition was free. `063514 This College Royale, later renamed College

de France, became the warming hearth of French humanism, the home of

the free but disciplined mind of France.

Spain, though passionately orthodox, had excellent universities,

fourteen in 1553, including new foundations at Toledo, Santiago, and

Granada; that of Salamanca, with seventy professors and 6,778 students

in 1584, could bear comparison with any. The universities of Italy

continued to flourish; that of Bologna, in 1543, had fifty-seven

professors in the faculty of "arts," thirty-seven in law, fifteen in

medicine; and Padua was the Mecca of enterprising students from

north of the Alps. Poland testified to its golden age by enrolling

15,338 students at one time in the University of Cracow; `063515 and

in Poznan the Lubranscianum, founded (1519) by Bishop John

Lubranski, was dedicated to humanistic pursuits. All in all, the

universities suffered less in Catholic than in Protestant countries in

this cataclysmic century.

The importance of the teacher was underestimated, and he was

grievously underpaid. The professors at the College Royale received

200 crowns a year ($5,000?), but this was highly exceptional. At

Salamanca the professors were chosen by the students after a trial

period of sample lectures by rival candidates. Instruction was

mostly by lectures, sometimes brought to life by debates. Notetaking

served many a student in place of textbooks; dictionaries were rare;

laboratories were practically unknown except to alchemists. Students

were housed in cheap and poorly heated rooms, and became ill on

unclean or inadequate food. Many worked their way through college.

Classes began at six in the morning, ended at five in the afternoon.

Discipline was rigorous; even near-graduates might be flogged. The

students warmed themselves with street brawls and such wine and

wenches as they could afford. By one means or another they achieved

education, to a degree.

Girls of the lower classes remained illiterate; many of the middle

classes found moderate schooling in nunneries; well-to-do young

women had tutors. Holland boasted of several ladies who could be

courted in Latin, and who could probably conjugate better than they

could decline. In Germany the wife of Peutinger and the sisters and

daughters of Pirkheimer were famous for learning; in France the

women around Francis graced their flirtations with classical

quotations; and in England some bluestockings- More's daughters,

Jane Grey, "Bloody Mary," Elizabeth- were paragons of erudition.

Two famous teachers belong to this age. The lesser was Sir Thomas

Elyot, whose Boke Named the Governour (1531) outlined an education

by which pedigreed pupils might be fitted for statesmanship. Elyot

began by berating the cultural crudity of the English nobles; he

contrasted it with the learning credited to men of affairs in

ancient Greece and Rome, and quoted Diogenes the Cynic, who, "seeing

one without learning seated on a stone, remarked... 'Behold where

one stone sitteth on another.'" `063516 At seven the boy should be

placed under a carefully selected tutor, who will teach him the

elements of music, painting, and sculpture. At fourteen he is to be

taught cosmography, logic, and history, and is to be trained in

wrestling, hunting, shooting with the longbow, swimming, and tennis;

not football, for that is plebeian, and "therein is nothing but

beastly furie and external violence." The lad is to study the classics

at every stage of his education- first the poets, then the orators,

then the historians, then the generals, then the philosophers; to

which Elyot, as almost an afterthought, adds the Bible, thereby

reversing Luther's plan. For, despite his protestations, Elyot much

prefers the classics to the Bible. "Lord God, what incomparable

sweetness of words and matter in the works of Plato and Cicero,

wherein is joined gravity and delectation, excellent wisdom with

divine eloquence, absolute virtue with pleasure incredible," so

"that those books be almost sufficient to make a perfect and excellent

governor!" `063517

Juan Vives, humanest of the humanists, followed a larger aim and

wider course. Born at Valencia in 1492, he left Spain at seventeen,

never to see it again. He studied in Paris long enough to love

philosophy and despise Scholasticism. At twenty-six he wrote the first

modern history of philosophy- De initiis, sectis, et laudibus

philosophiae. In the same year he challenged the universities with an

attack on Scholastic methods of teaching philosophy; the scheme of

promoting thought by debates, he felt, promoted only futile

wrangling over inconsequential issues. Erasmus hailed the book,

recommended it to More, and politely feared that "Vives... will

overshadow... Erasmus." `063518 Perhaps through Erasmus' influence

Vives was appointed professor of the humanities at Louvain (1519).

Urged on by Erasmus, he published an edition of Augustine's City of

God with elaborate commentaries; he dedicated it to Henry VIII, and

received so cordial a reply that he moved to England (1523). He was

welcomed by More and Queen Catherine, his compatriot, and Henry

named him one of Princess Mary's tutors. Apparently for her guidance

he wrote On the Education of Children ( De ratione studii puerilis,

1523). All went well until he expressed disapproval of Henry's plea

for a marriage annulment. Henry stopped his salary, and put him

under house arrest for six weeks. Released, Vives returned to Bruges

(1528), and spent there the remaining years of his life.

Still idealistic at thirty-seven, he dedicated to Charles V an

Erasmian appeal for an international court of arbitration as a

substitute for war ( De concordia et discordia in humano genere,

1529). Two years later he issued his major work, De tradendis

disciplinis ( On the Transmission of Studies ), the most

progressive educational treatise of the Renaissance. He called for

an education directed "to the necessities of life, to some bodily or

mental improvement, to the cultivation and increase of

reverence." `063519 The pupil should enter school "as if into a holy

temple," but his studies there should prepare him to be a decent and

useful citizen. Those studies should cover the whole of life, and

should be taught in their interrelation, as they function in living.

Nature, as well as books, should be studied; things are more

instructive than theories. Let the student note the veins, nerves,

bones, and other parts of the body in their anatomy and action; let

him consult farmers, hunters, shepherds, gardeners... and learn

their lore; these gleanings will be more useful than the Scholastic

"babblement which has corrupted every branch of knowledge in the

name of logic." `063520 The classics, expurgated for youth, should

remain a vital part of the curriculum, but modern history and

geography are to be studied too. The vernaculars as well as Latin

should be taught, and all by the direct method of daily use.

Vives was so far ahead of his time that it lost sight of him, and

let him die in poverty. He remained a Catholic to the end.

===========================================================

==========

III. SCHOLARS

-

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++

The distinctive task of the universities, the academies, and the

humanists in the Renaissance was to gather, translate, and transmit

the old world of Greece and Rome to the young world of modern

Europe. The task was grandly accomplished, and the classic

revelation was complete.

Two men remain to be commemorated as oracles of this revelation.

Guillaume Bude, after living sixty-two years in hopes of making

Paris the heir of Italian humanism, came into his own when Francis

founded the College Royale. He began his adult studies with law, and

for almost a decade he buried himself in the Pandects of

Justinian. To understand these texts better- Latin in language but

Byzantine in bearings- he took up Greek with John Lascaris, and so

devotedly that his teacher, departing, bequeathed to him his

precious library of Greek books. When, at forty-one, Bude published

Annotationes in XXIV libros Pandectarum (1508), the Digest of

Justinian, for the first time in Renaissance jurisprudence, was

studied in itself and its environment, instead of being displaced by

the commentaries of the "glossators." Six years later he issued

another monument of recondite research, De asse et partibus - on

its surface a discussion of ancient coins and measures, but actually

an exhaustive consideration of classical literature in relation to

economic life. Still more impressive were his Commentarii linguae

graecae (1529), a work loosely ordered, but so rich in

lexicographic information and illumination that it placed Bude at

the head of all European Hellenists. Rabelais sent him a letter of

homage, Erasmus paid him the compliment of jealousy. Erasmus was a man

of the world, to whom scholarship was only a part of life; but to Bude

scholarship and life were one. "It is philology." he wrote, "that

has so long been my companion, my associate, my mistress, bound to

me by every tie of affection.... But I have been forced to loosen

the bonds of a love so devouring... that I found it destructive to

my health." `063521 He mourned that he had to steal time from his

studies to eat and sleep. In moments of distraction he married and

begot eleven children. Jean Clouet's portrait of him (in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) shows him in a pessimistic

mood, but Francis I must have found some warmth in him, for he made

him librarian at Fontainebleau, and liked to have the old scholar near

him, even on tours. On one of these Bude caught a fever. He left

precise instructions for an unceremonious funeral and quietly passed

away (1540). The College de France is his monument.

Paris had not yet in his time absorbed the intellectual life of

France. Humanism had a dozen French hearths: Bourges, Bordeaux,

Toulouse, Montpellier, and, above all, Lyons, where love and humanism,

ladies and literature, made a delightful mixture. And in Agen, where

no one would have looked for an emperor, Julius Caesar Scaliger

ruled imperiously over the philological scene after Bude's death. Born

probably at Padua (1484), he came to Agen at forty-one, and lived

there till his death (1558). Every scholar feared him, for he had a

masterly command of vituperative Latin. He made a name for himself

by attacking Erasmus for belittling the "Ciceronians"- sticklers for a

precise Ciceronian Latin. He criticized Rabelais, then criticized

Dolet for criticizing Rabelais. In a volume of Exercitationes he

examined Jerome Cardan's De subtilitate, and undertook to prove that

everything affirmed in that book was false, and everything denied in

it was true. His De causis linguae latinae was the first Latin

grammar based upon scientific principles, and his commentaries on

Hippocrates and Aristotle were remarkable for both their style and

their contributions to science. Julius had fifteen children, one of

whom became the greatest scholar of the next generation. His

Poetice, published four years after his death, shared with the

work of his son- and the influence of the Italians who followed

Catherine de Medicis to France- in turning French humanism back from

Greek to Latin studies.

A special gift of the Greek revival was Amyot's translation of

Plutarch's Lives. Jacques Amyot was one of Marguerite's many

proteges; through her he was appointed to a chair of Greek and Latin

at Bourges. His translations of Daphnis and Chloe and other Greek

love stories were rewarded, in the genial oddity of the times, with

a rich abbey. So secured, he traveled widely in Italy, indulging his

antiquarian and philological tastes. When he published the Lives

(1559) he prefaced the book with an eloquent plea for the study of

history as the "treasure house of humanity," a museum in which a

thousand examples of virtue and vice, statesmanship and decay, are

preserved for the instruction of mankind; like Napoleon, he considered

history a better teacher of philosophy than philosophy itself.

Nevertheless he proceeded to translate also Plutarch's Moralia. He

was promoted to the bishopric of Auxerre, and died there in the

ripeness of eighty years (1593). His version of the Lives was not

always accurate, but it was a work of literature in its own right,

endowed with a natural and idiomatic style quite equal to that of

the original. Its influence was endless. Montaigne reveled in it,

and turned from the France of St. Bartholomew to this select and

ennobled antiquity; Shakespeare took three plays from North's virile

translation of Amyot's translation; the Plutarchian ideal of the

hero modeled a hundred French dramas and revolutionists; and the Vies

des hommes illustres gave to the nation a pantheon of celebrities fit

to stir the more masculine virtues of the French soul.

===========================================================

==========

IV. THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE

-

It is customary and forgivable to call by this term, so rich in

overtones, the period between the accession of Francis I (1515) and

the assassination of Henry IV (1610). Essentially this colorful

flowering of French poetry and prose, manners and arts and dress was

less a rebirth than a ripening. By the patient resilience of men and

the new growth of the new-seeded earth, the French economy and

spirit had recovered from the Hundred Years' War. Louis XI had given

France a strong, centered, orderly government; Louis XII had given

it a fruitful decade of peace. The free, loose, fantastic creativeness

of the Gothic age survived, even and most in Rabelais, who so

admired the classics that he quoted nearly all of them. But the

great awakening was also a renascence. French literature and art

were unquestionably affected by a closer acquaintance with ancient

culture and classic forms. Those forms and the classic temper- the

predominance of intellectual order over emotional ardor- continued

in French drama, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture for

almost three centuries. The fertilizing agents in the new birth were

the French discovery and invasion of Italy, the French study of

Roman ruins, jurisprudence, and literature, of Italian letters and

arts, and the influx of Italian artists and poets into France. To

the happy issue many other factors contributed: printing; the

dissemination and translation of classic texts; the patronage of

scholars, poets, and artists by French kings, by their mistresses,

by Marguerite of Navarre, by ecclesiastics and aristocrats; and the

inspiration of women capable of appreciating other beauties than their

own. All these elements came together in the flourishing of France.

Francis I, who inherited all this, had as a page the poet who served

as a transition from Gothic to classic, from Villon to Renaissance.

Clement Marot entered history as a frolicsome lad of thirteen who

amused the King with jolly tales and sprightly repartees. Some years

later Francis smiled upon the youth's adventures and quarrels with

"all the ladies of Paris," for he agreed with Marot that they were

very charming indeed:

-

La Francoise est entiere et sans rompeure;

Plaisir la meine, au profit ne regarde.

Conclusion: qui en parle ou brocarde,

Francoises sont chef-d'oeuvre de nature-

-

"The Frenchwoman is flawless and complete; pleasure leads her; she

does not look for profit. To conclude: whatever anyone may say to

ridicule them, Frenchwomen are nature's masterpiece." `063522

Marot babbled poems like a bubbling spring. They were seldom

profound, but often touched with tender sentiment; they were verses of

occasion, conversation pieces, ballads, roundels, madrigals, or

satires and epistles reminiscent of Horace or Martial. He noted with

some pique that women (himself to the contrary notwithstanding)

could be more readily persuaded by diamonds than by dithyrambs:

-

Quant les petites vilotieres

Trouvent quelque hardi amant

Qui faire luire un diamant

Devant leurs yeux riants et verts,

Coac! elles tombent a l'envers.

Tu ris? Maudit soit-il qui erre!

C'est la grande vertu de la pierre

Qui eblouit ainsi leurs yeux.

Tels dons, tels presents servent mieux

Que beaute, savoir, ni prieres.

Ils endorment les chambrieres,

Ils ouvrent les portes fermees

Comme s'elles etaient charmees;

Ils font aveugles ceux qui voient,

Et taire les chiens qui aboient.

Ne me crois-tu point?

-

That is to say:

-

When little trollops make their price,

And find some moneyed lover bold

Who can a sparking diamond hold

Before their olive laughing eyes,

Coac! They fall quite inside out.

You laugh? Damn him who here goes wrong!

For to that stone virtues belong

That would seduce eyes most devout.

Such gifts and boons do more avail

Than beauty, prayers, or wisdom staid;

They send to sleep the lady's maid,

And dogs forget to bark or wail.

Closed doors fly open to your will,

As if bewitched by magic mind,

And eyes that saw become quite blind.

Now tell me, do you doubt me still?

-

In 1519 Marot became valet-de-chambre to Marguerite, and fell in

love with her dutifully; gossip said she returned his moans, but

more likely she gave him nothing but religion. He developed a moderate

sympathy with the Protestant cause in the intervals of his amours.

He followed Francis to Italy, fought like a Bayard at Pavia, had the

honor to be captured with his King, and- no ransom being expected

for a poet- was released. Back in France, he announced his

Protestant ideas so openly that the bishop of Chartres summoned him,

and kept him under genteel imprisonment in the episcopal palace. He

was set free by Marguerite's intercession, but was soon arrested for

helping prisoners to escape from the police. Francis bailed him out,

and took him to Bayonne to sing the charms of his new bride, Eleanor

of Portugal. After another session in jail- for eating bacon in

Lent- he followed Marguerite to Cahors and Nerac.

Presently the affair of the placards revived the campaign against

the French Protestants. News reached Marot that his rooms in Paris had

been searched, and that a warrant had gone out for his arrest

(1535). Fearful that even Marguerite's skirts would not suffice to

hide him, he fled to Italy, to the Duchess Renee in Ferrara. She

welcomed him as if a reborn Virgil had arrived from Mantua; and

perhaps she knew that he liked to link his name with that of Publius

Vergilius Maro. He resembled more the lighthearted, amorous Ovid, or

his favorite Villon, whose poems he edited and whose life he

relived. When Duke Ercole II let it be known that he was surfeited

with Protestants, Clement moved on to Venice. Word reached him that

Francis had offered pardon to abjuring heretics; Marot, thinking the

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.