The Emergence of the Modern World View – the
Sixteenth Century
Backhouse, Chp 3
Q What marks the beginning of the transition
to the modern world, according to Backhouse?
Some Revisionist History
The
idea that learning died after the fall of Rome and that Europe plunged into
centuries of ignorance (the Dark Ages) has been the conventional wisdom since
the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Most books on medieval Europe - including
Backhouse's - continue to promote this idea. Fortunately for the hundreds
of million of Europeans who lived during these centuries, the Middle Ages
were far from dark. It is certainly true that learning and culture suffered
for a time, and the unity that the Roman Empire brought to southern and western
Europe (through force) was lost. Europe fragmented into a large number of
small kingdoms and free cities, and barbarians from the north and the east
did indeed take their toll on intellectual and cultural life ... for awhile.
But long before the Renaissance revived classical learning, Europeans were
progressing on multiple fronts. Greek philosophy may have been largely forgotten,
but the Roman approach to law had spread across much of Europe, and learning
was well underway in many areas.
The Roman Empire was an exploitative
political system. The economies of southern Europe, northern Africa, the Levant,
and Palestine provided Rome with the food and raw materials needed to sustain
a bloated, profligate Roman society. High rates of taxation combined with
autocratic changes in policies to discourage agricultural and commercial innovation.
Roman production techniques were generally crude and relatively stagnant.
Innovation and technical progress actually increased after the fall
of Rome. Over the centuries of the purported "Dark Ages" European
technology and productivity increased substantially.
The Renaissance
Q
The Renaissance began in northern Italy even before this. Who started the process?
Q
How did Renaissance thought differ from scholastic thought?