It has been impossible to avoid an air of superficiality, and the repetition of facts known to every schoolboy, in this sketch of so complicated a subject as the Renaissance,—embracing many nations, a great variety of topics and an indefinite period of time. Yet no other treatment was possible upon the lines laid down at the outset,New political relations in Europe dating from the Renaissance. where it was explained why the term Renaissance cannot now be confined to the Revival of Learning and the effect of antique studies upon literary and artistic ideals. The purpose of this article has been to show that, while the Renaissance implied a new way of regarding the material world and human nature, a new conception of man’s destiny and duties on this planet, a new culture and new intellectual perceptions penetrating every sphere of thought and energy, it also involved new reciprocal relations between the members of the European group of nations. The Renaissance closed the middle ages and opened the modern era,—not merely because the mental and moral ideas which then sprang into activity and owed their force in large measure to the revival of classical learning were opposed to medieval modes of thinking and feeling, but also because the political and international relations specific to it as an age were at variance with fundamental theories of the past. Instead of empire and church, the sun and moon of the medieval system, a federation of peoples, separate in type and divergent in interests, yet bound together by common tendencies, common culture and common efforts, came into existence. For obedience to central authority was substituted balance of power. Henceforth the hegemony of Europe attached to no crown, imperial or papal, but to the nation which was capable of winning it, in the spiritual region by mental ascendancy, and in the temporal by force.
That this is the right way of regarding the subject appears from the events of the first two decades of the 16th century, those years in which the humanistic revival attained its highest point in Italy. Luther published his theses in 1517, sixty-four years after the fall of Constantinople, twenty-three years after the expedition ofConservative and progressive parties in modern Europe. Charles VIII to Naples, ten years before the sack of Rome, at a moment when France, Spain and England had only felt the influences of Italian culture but feebly. From that date forward two parties wrestled for supremacy in Europe, to which may be given the familiar names of Liberalism and Conservatism, the party of progress and the party of established institutions. The triumph of the former was most signal among the Teutonic peoples. The Latin races, championed by Spain and supported by the papacy, fought the battle of the latter, and succeeded for a time in rolling back the tide of revolutionary conquest. Meanwhile that liberal culture which had been created for Europe by the Italians before the contest of the Reformation began continued to spread, although it was stifled in Italy and Spain, retarded in France and the Low Countries, well-nigh extirpated by wars in Germany, and diverted from its course in England by the counter-movement of Puritanism. The autos da fé of Seville and Madrid, the flames to which Bruno, Dolet and Paleario were flung, the dungeon of Campanella and the seclusion of Galileo, the massacre of St Bartholomew and the faggots of Smithfield, the desolated plains of Germany and the cruelties of Alva in the Netherlands, disillusioned Europe of those golden dreams which had arisen in the earlier days of humanism, and which had been so pleasantly indulged by Rabelais. In truth the Renaissance was ruled by no Astraea redux, but rather by a severe spirit which brought no peace but a sword, reminding men of sternest duties, testing what of moral force and tenacity was in them, compelling them to strike for the old order or the new, suffering no lukewarm halting between two opinions. That, in spite of retardation and retrogression, the old order of ideas should have yielded to the new all over Europe,—that science should have won firm standing-ground, and political liberty should have struggled through those birth-throes of its origin,—was in the nature of things. Had this not been, the Renaissance or re-birth of Europe would be a term without a meaning. (J. A. S.)
Literature.—The special articles on the several arts and the literatures of modern Europe, and on the biographies of great men mentioned in this essay, will give details of necessity here omitted. Of works on the Renaissance in general may be mentioned Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Eng. trans., 1878); G. Voigt, Wiederbelebung des Classischen Alterthums (2 vols. 3rd ed., by M. Lehnerdt, 1893); J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy; Marc Monnier, Renaissance de Dante à Luther; Eugene Müntz, Précurseurs de la Renaissance (1882), Renaissance en Italie et en France (1885), and Hist. de l’art pendant la Renaissance (1889–95); Ludwig Geiger, Humanismus und Renaissance in Italien und Deutschland (1882), and Cambridge Modern History, vol. i., “The Renaissance” (Cambridge, 1903), where full bibliographies will be found.
RENAIX, a town of Belgium in the province of East Flanders, 8 m. S. of Oudenarde. It has extensive dyeworks, bleaching grounds and manufactories for linen and woollen goods. Pop. (1904) 20,760.
RENAN, ERNEST (1823–1892), French philosopher and Orientalist, was born on the 27th of February 1823 at Tréguier. His father’s people were of the fisher-clan of Renans or Ronans; his grandfather, having made a small fortune by his fishing shack, bought a house at Tréguier and settled there, and his father, captain of a small cutter and an ardent Republican, married the daughter of Royalist trading-folk from the neighbouring town of Lannion. All his life Renan was divided between his father’s and his mother’s political beliefs. He was only five years old when his father died, and his sister Henriette, twelve years older than Ernest, a girl of remarkable character, was henceforth morally the head of the household. Having in vain attempted to keep a school for girls at Tréguier, she left her native place and went to Paris as teacher in a young ladies boarding-school. Ernest meanwhile was educated in the ecclesiastical seminary of his native place. His good-conduct notes for this period describe him as “docile, patient, diligent, painstaking, thorough.” We do not hear that he was brilliant, but the priests cared little for such qualities. While the priests were grounding him in mathematics and Latin, his mother completed his education. She was only half a Breton. Her paternal ancestors came from Bordeaux, and Renan used to say that in his own nature the Gascon and the Breton were constantly at odds.
In the summer of 1838 Renan carried off all the prizes at the college of Tréguier. His sister in Paris told the doctor of the school in which she taught about the success of her brother, and he carried the news to F. A. P. Dupanloup, then engaged in organizing the ecclesiastical college of St Nicholas du Chardonnet, a school in which the young Catholic nobility and the most gifted pupils of the Catholic seminaries were to be educated together, with a view to cementing the bond between the aristocracy and the priesthood. Dupanloup sent for Renan at once. He was fifteen and a half. He had never been outside his Breton province. “I learned with stupor that knowledge was not a privilege of the church . . . I awoke to the meaning of the words talent, fame, celebrity.” Above all, religion seemed to him wholly different in Tréguier and in Paris. The superficial, brilliant, pseudo-scientific Catholicism of the capital did not satisfy Renan, who had accepted the austere faith of his Breton masters.
In 1840 Renan left St Nicholas to study philosophy at the seminary of Issy. He entered with a passion for Catholic scholasticism. The rhetoric of St Nicholas had wearied him, and his serious intelligence hoped to satisfy itself with the vast and solid material of Catholic theology. Reid and Malebranche first attracted him among the philosophers, and after these he turned to Hegel, Kant and Herder. Renan began to perceive the essential contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith that he professed, but an appetite for truths that can be verified restrained his scepticism. “Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth; I am eager for mathematics,” he wrote to his sister Henriette. Henriette had accepted in the family of Count Zamoyski an engagement more lucrative than her former place. She exercised
