“In general, endings always remain unclear.” So says Theodore K. Rabb, professor of Renaissance and early modern Europe at Princeton University, in “The Last Days of the Renaissance & the March to Modernity” (2006), a crisp but powerful essay on the generally neglected historical topic: “What came after the Renaissance?”
Several suggestions have been made. The Reformation is an obvious candidate, but Rabb says the time overlap is far too extensive to justify the complete separation of the two (i.e. the Renaissance certainly didn’t end in 1517). Other proposed alternatives – such as “Early Modern” Europe and “Modernity” – are so vague as to be almost useless.
Rabb acknowledges that many scholars reject the practice of periodization as inherently arbitrary and unworthy of serious consideration. He says they see period labels and descriptions as “quixotic at best and empty at worst.” However, the author couldn’t disagree more. For Rabb, “periodization is the essential armature on which all of history rests.” He believes that “the coherences that bind periods together are worth exposing” and uncovering these coherences is the primary goal of this book. Rabb argues that the transformation from the Renaissance to a next epoch in world history happened in the late seventeenth century and unified around a series of independent but interconnected revolutions in science, industry, communication, politics, and culture.
Before discussing what came after the Renaissance, Rabb considers what came before it. A defining feature of the Middle Ages (950 to 1300) in Europe was its surprising degree of homogeneity. The organization and practices of the Church, feudalism, craft guilds, warfare, and education were strikingly similar across Europe during this period. The author says that discontent slowly eroded this cohesion. The erosion of papal authority undermined the power and cohesion of the Church. The development of gunpowder weapons undermined the political power and cohesion of the nobility. The bubonic plague undermined the economic power and social cohesion of society. The assault on the assumptions of medieval philosophy and education undermined long held cultural values. The upshot was a backward-looking revolution in attitude and behavior. There emerged a new focus on ancient sources for finding a more effective and praiseworthy model of human behavior and the promotion of the active over the contemplative life. Perhaps most dramatically of all, an entirely new aesthetic in art developed that expressed a strong appreciation of nature and conveyed strong emotions in subjects. The result was spectacular new pieces of art that featured well defined and realistic landscapes, natural folds in drapery, and three dimensional figures in natural poses and painted with flawless perspective.
Several characteristics distinguished Renaissance Europe from the Middle Ages on the one hand and Early Modern Europe on the other. One of the most important was the rapid rise of gigantic armies equipped with gunpowder weapons of unprecedented power. In the age gunpowder, soldiers could be relatively easily armed and trained compared to the knights and bowmen of the Middle Ages. Rabb notes that Henry V probably had at most 8,000 men in his army at Agincourt in 1415. By the late seventeenth century Louis XIV maintained a standing army of 400,000. The size, cost, and destructive power of these new European armies broke all precedent.
It is difficult to determine which came first: huge standing armies or the powerful centralized governments necessary to support them. However, we do know that both happened around the same time, the decades around 1500. The explosive growth in the magnitude and cost of warfare was accompanied by an equally rapid shift toward the centralization of state power, the bureaucratization of state operations, and the dramatic expansion of taxation. These actions were self-reinforcing and intimately connected. A large and formidable army allowed kings to consolidate power and heavily tax their subjects, which in turn allowed the state to maintain large and lethal armies. The state and the army in combination allowed kings and princes to defeat one of its most redoubtable rivals from the Middle Ages, Rabb says: the aristocracy.
In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy distinguished themselves primarily by valor in battle, usually on horseback as a knight. The newly impersonal destructiveness of gunpowder completely undermined the basic quality that distinguished the lord in society – his bravery and skill in armed conflict and his security behind the high, thin walls of his rural castle. During the Renaissance the nobility had to completely transform their self-image as gentlemen. They eventually redefined their role in society in a process Rabb refers to mockingly as “domestication.” Valor on the battlefield was replaced by education, cultural accomplishment, and skills at court. The quest for virtue and the love of beauty were paramount. Secular learning and the arts became the source of a new kind of prestige. Consequently there was a dramatic increase in education during the Renaissance. There were perhaps twenty universities in Europe in 1300 and over one hundred by 1500. “As bravery lost its glow,” Rabb writes, “the joy of patronage helped to create a new style of life.” By the mid-seventeenth century Europe’s nobles were primed for their new role in centralized state building.
Another one of the “defining characteristics of the age,” according to Rabb, was the rise of capitalism. This included the rapid rise of cities, the development of banks and stock markets, and the spread of the “putting-out system,” which created a new specialization of function and division of labor. But it also included a new spirit of commerce – careful record keeping, long-term planning, and the rational pursuit of sustained profit.
The most clear cut boundary marker identifying the Renaissance is bubonic plague. It arrived in western Europe in the 1340s and remained a scourge until the late 1600s, almost perfectly concurrent with the Renaissance. However, the “chief distinguishing mark” of the age, according to Rabb, is a deliberate and enthusiastic turn to the distant past. Indeed, the Renaissance has been called a backward-looking revolution. Even the Reformation, often cited by scholars as a distinct epoch that followed the Renaissance, was in fact an effort to restore the true doctrines of the Church, not reshape them. The theologians who laid the foundation for the Reformation – John Wycliffe (1328-1384) in England and Jan Hus (1369-1415) in Bohemia – sought truth and virtue in the antiquity of the Bible. In fact, the author says that the Reformation was “a quintessentially Renaissance movement.” He writes that it “almost goes without saying” that the ambition of Wycliffe and Hus was to restore Biblical purity to the Church closely parallels both Luther’s attempt to return to the Bible and Petrarch’s call for a return to antiquity. The same is true for the burgeoning Scientific Revolution. “All were engaged in enterprises that began by looking to antiquity for guidance,” Rabb says.
The author argues that the beginning of the end of the Renaissance occurred over just a handful of decades around the year 1500 (specifically 1490 to 1520) when a confluence of events put western civilization in crisis. The first and most basic transformation was a dramatic increase in population after the collapse caused by the first waves of the plague. Between 1450 and 1600 Europe’s population grew by 50 percent, from 50 million to 75 million people. Urban settlement grew significantly (by the seventeenth century over 10 percent of the population lived in towns of over 10,000). Meanwhile, food prices quadrupled during the fifteenth century. Beggars became more visible. By the early seventeenth century the flow of silver from the New World slowed dramatically while temperatures cooled during the so-called Little Ice Age.
The period 1490 to 1550 witnessed the unmistakable revolution in military affairs associated with gunpowder weapons in the hands of massive armies supported and funded by modern, centralized bureaucratic states. “Bureaucrats proliferated,” Rabb writes, “armed forces grew.” The capacity of these armies for destruction and intimidation was increasing geometrically, he says. By the time of the Thirty Years War, he writes, “Europe was approaching an abyss of uncontrollable mayhem.”
Interestingly, Rabb puts heavy emphasis on the importance of opera, which was first developed during the period of upheaval at the turn of the sixteenth century. He says that opera was significant and unusual because it brought together every known means of creativity at the time: poetry, music, dance, painting, sculpture, and architecture. “Opera was the final flourish of the Renaissance,” Rabb writes, “a last resort to the inspiration of antiquity in order to address the concerns of a particular time.” Indeed, the turbulence and instability of the times was reflected in Mannerism, the new style of art that took hold in the years after 1520.
So when did the Renaissance end? Rabb embraces an argument made by previous scholars, such as Paul Hazard, that puts antiquity at the center of the story. If one of the hallmark characteristics of the Renaissance was the embrace and reverence of the classics, then the end of the Renaissance can be dated to around 1700 when Europe confidently moved beyond the authority of the past. Jonathan Swift’s publication of “The Battle of the Books” in 1697 perfectly captures the angst and conflict between proponents of antiquity and modernity and the books they recommended. The rise of science did not define the age, as some have argued, Rabb says. Rather, the blossoming of science was just one symptom of the “fundamental re-thinkings of the age.” The Scientific Revolution was “the decisive blow that demolished the central Renaissance belief in the superiority of antiquity.” For the first time, society embraced the idea of progress, the steady and decisive advance of useful knowledge.Suddenly it was held that contemporaries might know more and even be better than ancient authorities. Powerful kings, such as Peter the Great, moved aggressively to launch reforms that promised a decisive break with the past. Something even more powerful than ancient wisdom had been uncovered – the principle of deliberate and sustained progress through human ingenuity.
Rabb says that, more than anything else, two events – the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution – dissolved the coherence of the Renaissance. He argues that it was a revolution in attitudes towards war and the supernatural that unfolded over perhaps fifty years in the middle of the seventeenth century that was the “pivot around which all else revolves” and marks the period when the Renaissance came to an end. The “ferocity, callousness, and destructiveness” of the Thirty Years War caused a continent-wide trauma that could not be undone. Moreover, modern gunpowder warfare rendered individual battlefield bravado, long the nobility’s distinguishing claim to power in society, virtually useless. Rabb highlights several Dutch paintings from this period showing a sleeping or weary Mars, the god of war, clear symbols that warfare was a spent force in seventeenth century Europe. “There is no glory [in war paintings of this period];” Rabb writes, “only loss, vengeance, and mutilation, the crippled and the dead.”
The other sign of the Renaissance’s end, according to Rabb, was the relatively sudden rejection of the supernatural. The author notes a specific inflection point in this regard: a meeting in December 1655 where Oliver Cromwell gathered with his most senior advisors to discuss the scriptural prophecy related to re-admitting Jews to England some 350 years after they had been expelled (Cromwell ultimately shelved the idea). Rabb says that prophecy, despite its poor track record of forecasting, nevertheless maintained a “mesmerizing effect” and had a “special standing in this world.” The relative suddenness that this obsession disappeared was the “fundamental cultural shift of the age,” according to the author. An attempt to invoke “scripture prophecy” for help in settling a significant political decision even a mere decade after Cromwell’s session with his leading ministers would have been “unthinkable,” Rabb says.
The cultural shift evident by the late seventeenth century was clearly reflected in art, too. “The high emotion of the Baroque gave way to the genteel elegance of Rococo,” Rabb writes. Gone were the deliberate emulation of antiquity and works of religious passion. Gone were the powerful religious and historical dramas popular in the Renaissance, replaced by sedate, pastoral settings representing daily life.
In summary, by 1700 the unquestioned superiority of antiquity had been undermined; science, reason, and progress emerged as the new ideology of the age; centralized power had been ceded to the state; but most of all, according to Rabb, it was the emergence of a new antiwar sentiment and the utter demise of the supernatural and prophecy that signaled a “cultural reorientation of massive proportions.” The author concludes by arguing for a new post-Renaissance periodization from 1700 to 1900 that he calls the Age of Revolutions, a clumsy but undeniably accurate depiction of the age. The revolutions included by Rabb are varied: political (American and French), industrial (steam power and factories), communications (canals, steam engines, telegraphs, and telephones), social (urbanization and consumerism), and cultural (changes to daily life, such as Christmas eclipsing Easter as the most important holiday).
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