Renaissance humanism in Northern Europe

• 1. Introduction

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  Renaissance humanism arrived in Germany and northern Europe only after it had already reshaped Italy. Historians typically date its start to the invention of the printing press around 1450. Its busiest years ran only from the close of the 15th century to about 1520. Even then, it met stiff resistance from the scholastic theology that ruled the universities. In 1471, a papal legate named Campanus traveled to the Diet of Regensburg and did not hide his opinion of the country. He complained about the cold climate, the dirt, the poverty, the sour wine and the miserable food. He joked that he wished he could not smell, since his nose caught every foul scent, while his ears deserved praise for understanding nothing. Campanus was not unusual. Italians of his era commonly saw Germany as a land of barbarians, rude at the table and quick to drink. Yet within decades, German scholars, painters and printers built something Italy never had. They created a version of the new learning that pointed toward the Bible rather than the classics. It grew inside universities and schools rather than princely courts. That movement helped ignite the Protestant Reformation. What did northern Europe's own path toward the new learning look like, and why did its scholars turn from Cicero toward scripture instead?

• 2. A Path of Its Own

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  Even Erasmus spent time teaching in Cambridge, and he was on close terms with the professors in Basel. Catholic historians have noted that the university and the school carried far more weight in the North than they had in the South. As the movement spread, new universities sprang up across the region, from Basel to Rostock. Germany had no princely patrons of arts and learning to rival the Renaissance popes or the Medici family in Italy. The new culture there was not exclusive or aristocratic. It aimed instead at the general spread of intelligence, and it pushed hard on primary and grammar schools. Before Italian ideas crossed the Alps, a separate intellectual current was already flowing down from schools run by the Brethren of the Common Life. When southern influence finally arrived, German scholars did not simply copy it. They took the impulse from the South and shaped their own path forward.

  That grassroots push into ordinary classrooms would soon put Germany's schools at the center of a fight over religious authority.

• 3. Scripture Over Antiquity

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  Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron did not reach German readers until the physician Henry Stainhowel translated it, sometime before his death in 1482. It was one of the few Italian works to find any following at all north of the Alps. German scholars showed little of the polish or elegance of their Italian counterparts. What they lacked in brilliance, they made up for in seriousness of purpose and exactness of scholarship.

  In Italy, the ancient classics had absorbed the literati's full attention, and writers felt a burning need to render them into their own tongue. North of the Alps, that urge never took hold in the same way, and Italian literature's looser moral attitude found few imitators either. Instead, scholars north of the Alps trained their focus on the Old and New Testaments. They studied Greek and Hebrew not to worship antiquity, but to reach the original sources of the Christian faith more directly. That choice prepared the ground for the Protestant Reformation.

  Christian humanists, Erasmus and Luther among them, placed biblical texts above any human or church authority. They insisted that readers work out the meaning of scripture for themselves. That stance, tied to the broader shift of scholarship from the monastery to the university, opened a new freedom of expression. Yet the same men who championed that freedom did not always extend it further. Some of them nonetheless censured the Anabaptists, denying elsewhere the very freedom of expression they had championed.

  That same tension between new freedoms and old boundaries would soon play out on canvas as well as in print.

• 4. Brushes Turned to Faith

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  Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg in 1471 and died there in 1528, a life that bracketed nearly the entire movement. Lucas Cranach the Elder lived from 1472 to 1553, and Hans Holbein the Younger lived from 1497 to 1543. The two of them worked alongside Dürer as the era's leading German painters. None of the three showed much interest in mythological subjects, apart from Cranach's nude figures. All three were drawn toward the Reformation, though most still kept accepting commissions for traditional Catholic works. Dürer and Holbein both kept close contact with the leading humanists of their day. Cranach settled in Wittenberg after 1504 and there painted portraits of Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon and other leaders of the German Reformation. Holbein, for his part, produced frontispieces and illustrations for Protestant books, and he painted his own portraits of Erasmus and Melanchthon.

  Long before any of these painters picked up a brush, one Italian secretary at the imperial court had already crossed the mountains. He carried word of the new learning north, decades ahead of any of them.

• 5. Crossing the Alps

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  Aeneas Sylvius served as one of the secretaries at the church council in Basel and later resided at the court of Emperor Frederick III, long before anyone called him pope. Historians point to him as the clearest link between the scholarship of Italy and that of Germany. The connection was never carried by one man alone, though. Trade routes running from northern Italy to Augsburg, Nuremberg and Konstanz carried the reputation of the Renaissance into German cities long before any book did. Frederick III's own visits to Italy, Charles VIII's military campaigns, and the Aragonese princes' rise to the throne of Naples all played a part. Together they pulled Germans, Frenchmen and Spaniards south. A steady stream of pilgrims traveled to Rome, and the Spanish popes drew crowds of their own countrymen to the city. As word of Italian culture spread, scholars and artists began making their own trips to Venice, Florence and Rome. They came home carrying the spark of the new era.

  Aeneas himself found Vienna beautiful, even if it looked modest beside Italy's grandest cities. He also noted that German princes and nobles cared more for horses and dogs than for poets and scholars. They prized their wine cellars over the muses, he said.

  Johannes Santritter, a German who had settled in Italy, conceded that Italy still ran slightly ahead of Germany in the humanities. But he argued that many Italians were secretly jealous of German science and technology, pointing to the printing press and the astronomer Regiomontanus as proof. Whatever doubts lingered were soon answered by the solid scholarship rising out of Germany and the Netherlands. If Italy had handed Germany an intellectual spark, Germany handed the world something larger in return. That gift was the printing press itself, called the most important tool in intellectual history since the invention of the alphabet.

  That same printing press would soon fill the libraries of a fast-growing network of German universities.

• 6. A Web of Universities

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  The University of Vienna opened its doors in 1365, nearly a century before humanism reached Germany at all. Heidelberg followed in 1386, Cologne in 1388, Erfurt in 1392, Würzburg in 1402, Leipzig in 1409 and Rostock in 1419. All of them were founded before the new movement ever arrived.

  During the second half of the 15th century, a fresh wave followed. Greifswald and Freiburg opened in 1457, Trier did the same that year, Basel followed in 1459, Ingolstadt in 1472, and Mainz in 1477, alongside Tübingen. Wittenberg came last, founded in 1502. Ingolstadt eventually lost its separate identity in 1826, when it was folded into the university at Munich. Wittenberg later lost its own separate existence as well, when it merged with Halle.

  Most of these schools taught across four faculties, though the papacy was often slow to approve a theology department. At Vienna and Rostock, it was the charter of the secular prince, not the pope, that authorized the schools to teach theology at all. Religious influence ran deep in these institutions, but student behavior did not always follow. Luther himself said that parents who sent their sons to university were sending them toward ruin. An official record from Leipzig, dating to the close of the 15th century, put it more bluntly. Students arrived from home obedient and pious, the record said, but how they returned, only God knew.

  In the Netherlands, that influence lingered longer, lasting until roughly 1550. There, universities and so-called Latin schools driven by humanist teachers helped push literacy higher than in most other European kingdoms.

  Behind those official walls, an entirely different network of local classrooms was already shaping how ordinary children learned to read.

• 7. Teachers and Their Halls

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  Erfurt was the first university to give the new learning a real welcome, taking in the scholar Peter Luder of Kislau in 1466. Luder had traveled through Greece and Asia Minor before holding a chair at Heidelberg starting in 1456. At Erfurt, he lectured on Virgil, Jerome, Ovid and other Latin writers. Nicolas Marschalck taught Greek on campus there, and he oversaw the first Greek book ever printed in Germany, which came off the press in 1501. John of Wesel also taught at Erfurt. It became Luther's own university, and among his professors there, he singled out Trutvetter for pointing him toward the serious study of Scripture.

  Heidelberg, chartered by the elector Ruprecht I and Pope Urban VI, showed little enthusiasm for the new movement at first. Its elector-palatine, Philip, who ruled from 1476 to 1508, later gathered several of its supporters at his court, Reuchlin among them. Ingolstadt briefly had Reuchlin on its faculty too, and in 1492 it appointed Conrad Celtes as professor of poetry and eloquence. Basel established a chair of poetry in 1474, founded under Pope Pius II, with two Italians, Finariensis and Publicius, among its first teachers. Its students over the years included Reuchlin along with the future reformers Leo Jud and Zwingli.

  Tübingen created a stipend for oratory in 1481, and Gabriel Biel taught there until almost the very end of the century. The year after Biel died, Heinrich Bebel was called in to lecture on poetry. One of Bebel's most notable students was Philip Melanchthon, who both studied and taught at Tübingen from 1512 to 1518. Reuchlin himself was called from Ingolstadt to Tübingen in 1521 to teach Hebrew and Greek, but he died only a few months after arriving.

  Leipzig and Cologne stayed loyal to scholasticism until Luther arrived on the scene, at which point Leipzig changed course. Wittenberg was the last German university founded in the Middle Ages. Its founder, Frederick the Wise, placed it under the patronage of the Virgin Mary and St. Augustine. It later gained worldwide influence through its professors Luther and Melanchthon. Wittenberg had no instruction in Greek at all until 1518. That year, the 21-year-old Melanchthon, soon to become Germany's leading Greek scholar, was appointed to one of its chairs. Luther said Melanchthon's lecture room filled up immediately, with theologians of every rank crowding in to hear him.

  Nuremberg and Strasbourg carried, if anything, even more weight as centers of the new culture than the university towns themselves. Along with Basel and Augsburg, these two cities ran Germany's most prosperous printing houses. By the close of the 15th century, Nuremberg had four Latin schools. Among its residents was Willibald Pirkheimer, a patron of learning and close friend of the city's own famous painter.

  Popular education in general stood far more advanced in Germany during the century before the Reformation than it did elsewhere in Europe. Beyond the traditional monastic and civic schools, the Brothers of the Common Life ran schools at Zwolle, Deventer, 's-Hertogenbosch and Liège in the Low Countries. Every leading town, besides, had a school of its own. Sélestat, in Alsace, earned a reputation as a classical center. When the scholar Thomas Platter visited, he found Hans Sapidus teaching there and called it the best school he had ever encountered. In 1494, Wesel had five pedagogues teaching reading, writing, arithmetic and singing. One Christmas, the local clergy gave each pupil cloth for a new coat, along with a coin, starting with the fourth class.

  Alexander Hegius taught at Deventer for nearly 25 years, until his death in 1498. Even at the age of 40, he was still willing to sit and learn at the feet of Agricola. He put the classics at the center of the curriculum and threw out the old textbooks. Trebonius, who taught Luther at Eisenach, belonged to that same class of dedicated schoolmasters. The penitential books of the era instructed parents to keep a close eye on their children, steering them off the streets and into the schoolroom.

  These schoolmasters and professors, scattered from Erfurt to Deventer, cleared the ground for a handful of individual scholars who would carry the movement even further.

• 8. The Men Who Led It

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  Rudolph Agricola was born Roelef Huisman near Groningen in 1443 and died in 1485. He earned the highest reputation of his day as a scholar. Erasmus and Melanchthon both praised him without reservation. Some have credited him with doing for German humanism what Petrarch had done for Italy's. Agricola wrote the first German-language biography of Petrarch himself. He studied at Erfurt, Louvain and Cologne before traveling to Italy, where he spent time at the universities of Pavia and Ferrara. He turned down a professor's chair in favor of a position at the court of Philip of the Palatinate in Heidelberg. He modeled his own writing on Cicero and Quintilian. In his final years he turned to theology and took up the study of Hebrew. Like Pico della Mirandola in Italy, Agricola lived as a monk. The inscription on his tomb in Heidelberg recorded that he had studied what Scripture taught about God and the true faith of the Savior.

  Jacob Wimpheling of Schlettstadt, who lived from 1450 to 1528, taught in Heidelberg and grew sharply critical of abuses within the clergy. Late in his career, though, he wanted to replace the study of Virgil and Horace with the more overtly Christian poets Sedulius and Prudentius.

  Sebastian Brant, who lived from 1457 to 1521, wrote the Ship of Fools and began his working life as a teacher of law in Basel.

  Mutianus Rufus went further still in his private letters, arguing that Christianity was as old as the world itself. Jupiter, Apollo, Ceres and Christ, he wrote, were only different names for the same hidden God.

  John Trithemius, who lived from 1462 to 1516, ran a Benedictine convent at Sponheim as abbot and built it into a genuine center of learning. He assembled a library of 2,000 volumes and wrote both a history of the Church Fathers and a catalogue of Germany's most renowned men. Growing friction with his own convent pushed him to resign in 1506. He then accepted an offer from the Bishop of Würzburg, Lorenz von Bibra, who held that office from 1495 to 1519. Trithemius became abbot of the Schottenkloster in Würzburg and stayed there for the rest of his life. Prelates and nobles kept making the trip to see him, consulting him and reading the Latin and Greek authors he had spent a lifetime collecting.