Many of my fellow atheists operate with a simplistic children’s picture book view of the past. This is one where the glories of Greece and Rome are destroyed and suppressed by the Medieval Church, but civilisation is saved by the geniuses of the Renaissance, whose revival of ancient thought, critical analysis and radical new thinking establishes most of what we value today. This conception of the Renaissance as a dramatic and revolutionary break with the medieval world is actually Modernity’s foundation story and is deeply ingrained in our popular consciousness. As a result, it is simply assumed by most anti-theist polemicists, despite it being substantially yet another nineteenth century myth.

If the myth of the Middle Ages as a benighted, theocratic, backward, superstitious intellectual wasteland is an assumed mainstay of anti-theistic rhetoric, the corresponding myth of the Renaissance as the sudden brilliant antidote to the “dark ages” is its inevitable flip side. Both are assumed rather than argued for. Neither are questioned or examined critically. And both are founded on an incurious and unthinking acceptance of popular conceptions of history rather than any contact with what actual historians have to say.

“The Renaissance” is brandished as an emblem of what founded modern ideas about the world and is effectively modernity’s origin myth. The great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance turned their backs on medieval ignorance and obscurantism and embraced the ancient wisdom of the Greeks and Romans, as well as gaining new heights of brilliance by apply that thinking in novel ways. As a result, it was an age of wonder and light and set humanity on the path to the lofty pinnacle that is us.

It is also often invoked in warnings about how the “dark ages” could return. Science populariser Carl Sagan did this in one of his cautions about the fragility of human knowledge and advancement in the 1980 TV series Cosmos (see here at 1.09 mins). There, in a passage still posted as a meme in online atheist fora, Sagan contrasts medieval “darkness” with the light of “Classical civilisation” and that of “the Italian Renaissance”:

If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity, we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of Classical civilisation and the Italian Renaissance.

Sagan had an extremely basic and quaintly old fashioned conception of history and regularly got its details badly wrong (on the Great Library of Alexandria, Hypatia and Greek proto-science generally, for example). But this idea of “the Renaissance” is deeply ingrained and so continues to be perpetuated in material for general readers. In 2015 The Telegraph published a helpful introduction to the Renaissance for readers of its “Culture” section. In “The Renaissance – Why It Changed the World” (6 October, 2015), the paper left its audience under no illusions about how remarkable, sudden and unprecedented the Renaissance was:

Never before (or since) had there been such a coming together of art, science and philosophy. …. The seeds of the modern world were sown and grown in the Renaissance. From circumnavigating the world to the discovery of the solar system, from the beauty of Michelangelo’s David to the perfection of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, from the genius of Shakespeare to the daring of Luther and Erasmus, and via breathtaking advances in science and mathematics, man achieved new heights in this tumultuous period. The Renaissance changed the world. You might even say it created all of what we now know as modern life.

And this is certainly the picture of the Renaissance that is taught in high schools to this day – a radical and remarkable wholesale departure from what went before that began in fourteenth century Italy and encompassed everyone from Luther to Shakespeare. In 2014 a contributor to the Reddit group /r/atheism shared a profound image of the Renaissance in contrast to the medieval world that he attributed to his high school history teacher:

She was talking about religion in the middle ages and she said imagine everyone with a lot of wedding veils over their faces. They can still see the world but not as clearly because religion blurs their view of the world. As the renaissance began some people began to pull the veils back an began to see the world more clearly with out (sic) religion.

(How My History Teacher Explain [sic] religion in The Middle Ages And In the Renaissance)

This reflects another key element of how and why the Renaissance is invoked by anti-theists: the claim that it was the beginning of an end to the dominance of religion.

These ideas about the Renaissance are so common that many people would be surprised to learn that the whole concept is actually fairly recent. No-one in the period in question talked about themselves living in a “renaissance” (in contrast to, for example, “the Enlightenment”, which was talked about as such at the time, at least by some). “The Renaissance” of popular conception was substantially the invention of two nineteenth century historians: Jules Michelet (1798-1874) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897). Michelet wrote his monumental Histoire de France between 1833 and 1867, tracing the history of France from Merovingian times to the eve of the French Revolution and filling seventeen volumes. The work was a huge success and was greatly influential on later French historians. He wrote in the age of republicanism and was radical in the way he maintained that history was about “the people” rather than merely a catalogue of the deeds of great men. He was also anti-Imperial, strongly anti-clerical and, as a result, he absolutely hated the Middle Ages.

The seventh volume of the Histoire was titled La Renaissance (1855) and this was the first full expression of the concept of a period of rebirth of ancient knowledge that was also a wellspring of innovation. For Michelet, the Renaissance was a wholesale rejection of “the bizarre and monstrous” Middle Ages and an embrace of the far superior values and aesthetics of the ancient world. A form of the term – rinascita (rebirth) – had been coined by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568) to describe the revival of classical art styles in his time, tracing this artistic movement from its beginning with Cimabue (b. 1240) and Giotto to its full development under Leonardo and Michelangelo (d. 1564). But Michelet took the word and applied it to a much broader idea of reaction against what he saw as the medieval view of the world that began with Columbus and stretched all the way to Galileo. As a proud Frenchman, he also made his Renaissance a very French affair.

However the real founder of the idea of “the Renaissance” so beloved by anti-theists is Burckhardt. His The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien – 1860) is the work that firmly established the idea of the Renaissance as the foundation of modernity in the popular consciousness. Translated into English in 1878, it built on Michelet’s conception of a rebirth that rejected all things medieval, for the betterment of all humanity. Like Vasari, he saw the art of Italy in the fifteenth century as the beginning of a wider revolution in thinking and innovation. The image of a veil being lifted referred to in the confused and half-remembered high school anecdote of the Reddit poster mentioned above is derived ultimately from a famous passage from Burckhardt’s book:

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness …. lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such. 

(Burckhardt, Dover, 2012, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore, p. 81)

So for Burckhardt, the Renaissance was a turning away from faith, illusion and childishness, a rejection of communal identity and an embrace of a new and modern individualism. It is easy to see why nineteenth century readers would find all this very satisfying. After all, they saw themselves as the epitome of this very modern view of things and the evidence of its fruits – science, technology, riches – were all around them. It is not hard to get people to agree with you if you tell them how good, wise, knowledgeable and prosperous they are compared to others (“savages” for example, or filthy medieval people), so Burckhardt’s account of the Renaissance as the source of modern progress and prosperity was widely accepted. And, for many, stubbornly remains so to this day.

This is despite the fact that, like a lot of nineteenth century history writing, Burckhardt’s thesis was big on broad sweeping statements and quite light on key definitions and substantiation, let alone careful critical analysis. As a result, it is not accepted by historians today.

The Revival of Ancient Learning

One of the first problems with Burckhardt’s thesis to be identified involved its emphasis on the sudden impact of a revival of ancient learning as the impetus for the flowering of the Renaissance. The traditional narrative he assumed was that the medieval world had turned its back on the wisdom of the ancients and the Humanists who arose in Italy in the fourteenth century were the first stirrings of the Renaissance, turning away from medieval preoccupations and reviving the learning of the Greeks and Romans:

But now, as competitor with the whole culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilization, founding itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its active representatives became influential because they knew what the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote, because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought and felt. The tradition to which they devoted themselves passed at a thousand points into genuine reproduction.

(Burckhardt, pp. 120-21)

According to Burckhardt, and to the perpetuators of the popular view of the Renaissance, it was scholars “rediscovering” long lost and neglected ancient works that stimulated a revolution in thinking and led to the Humanists of the Renaissance changing the whole way we think. Burckhardt gives a roll call of these scholars and their tireless efforts: Boccaccio and Petrarch as Humanist forerunners and then Niccolò Niccoli, Guarino Veronese and Poggio Bracciolini. The increasing interest in Greek works was, according to Burckhardt, stimulated by greater contact with Byzantine scholars, especially after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. So the neglect of this scholarship in the medieval centuries was corrected by this influx of new learning and knowledge.

Except this largely ignores the fact that this process was not in any way new. Western Europe had been reviving and rediscovering works lost in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire for centuries, and these scholars were just the latest burst of an activity that had been going on throughout the Middle Ages. The main difference was, perhaps, the kinds of works being sought out and revived, but previous generations of scholars had concentrated on texts that had the most interest and utility to them and this latest groups of scholars was doing exactly the same as their forebears.

So in the eighth and ninth centuries the scholars at the courts of Charlemagne and Otto had sought out and preserved many neglected books, but gave most attention to the ones that were particularly useful at the time: the works on rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, time measurement and calendars that were needed to establish a new educational infrastructure in a Europe recovering from centuries of turmoil and economic collapse. Building on that foundation, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an expanding and economically resurgent western Europe made greater intellectual contact with the Arabic and Greek speaking worlds and absorbed different works: ones on astronomy, mathematics, medicine, logic and metaphysics that were eagerly accepted by the growing schools network and new universities. And the continuing economic growth of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries meant there was a far larger intellectual class, with both the money and the leisure to use the scholarship founded on that university culture to seek out a different type of ancient book: poetry, plays, histories and political treatises.

Burckhardt and his modern successors in the popular sphere (Stephen Greenblatt’s notoriously Burckhardtian 2012 book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern being the most blatant example) ignore this continuity and pretend the Humanists sprang up out of nothing, rather than being just the latest in a long and distinguished medieval tradition. Burckhardt gestures vaguely at medieval precursors to his heroes (“the clerici vagantes of the twelfth century may perhaps be taken as their forerunners” he sniffs reluctantly), but he presents a picture of radical new activity and discontinuity over the continuation of a centuries long process. He skips over the fact that, for example, most of the works that Petrarch, Veronese and Bracciolini “discovered” were in copies preserved for them by the earlier generations of medieval scholars.

If these earlier waves of interest in and revival of Classical thought are taken into account, then it becomes hard to sustain the Burckhardtian conception of a vast and sudden influx of new ideas that in turn stimulated a revolution in thought. How, precisely, did reading the Iliad or Hesiod in the original Greek change the way western Europeans thought? Burckhardt does not really say. How does access to more Greek tragedies and a greater interest in them represent a radical transition to more modern thinking? Again, this is not argued, just vaguely gestured towards.

This problem gets even more pronounced when current anti-theists try to use this line of argument to claim this new interest in some works that had been previously neglected managed to break the power of the Church. This is often stated in broad and bold terms, but when pressed on the details the argument gets increasingly vague or simply collapses. In a recent exchange on Twitter an atheist activist asserted that the Renaissance in general and, much more specifically, “the rediscovery of Cicero” was “the beginning of the end” of “the dominance” of the Church.

When it was noted that medieval scholars had been happily studying Cicero for centuries before “the Renaissance” and that this had not somehow shaken the foundations of the Church, the activist assured us that it was specifically Petrarch’s “discovery” of a (medieval) manuscript of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus that was the intellectual earthquake in question. But when pressed on what exactly it was in those letters that was so revolutionary, so unlike all the already well-known ideas of Cicero and so devastating to the Church, the activist could not actually respond with any specifics. They were then asked why, if these letters were such a bombshell, a medieval churchman had been good enough to preserve them in the eleventh century for Petrarch to find three centuries later. Again, they were unable to explain this either.

Similarly modern Burckhardtians like Greenblatt are heavy on broad assertions but light on substantiation. Greenblatt’s book The Swerve won glowing reviews from general readers and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize – much to the dismay of historians, who regarded it as junk. Greenblatt tells the story of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, how it was “suppressed” and so “lost” during the Middle Ages (in fact, it was neither suppressed nor lost) and how its “rediscovery” by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, allegedly, changed the world. According to Greenblatt, this discovery was (in the words of one of the book’s alternative subtitles) “how the Renaissance began”. But, as many critics have noted, Greenblatt’s book is very sketchy on the details of how, exactly, this single work transformed our thinking. Like Burckhardt, he makes some vague gestures and sweeping assertions, but rarely manages to actually attribute any significant developments to the influence of Lucretius’ poem. And, like Burckhardt, much of his argument depends on contrasting the wonders of the Renaissance with a grotesque caricature of the Medieval Era, which to Greenblatt was a university-free zone full of flagellating monks who copied works without actually reading them. Somehow.

Similarly, New Atheist luminary A.C. Grayling thinks it was Humanist scholars who changed the world, though he claims it was by subjecting ancient Classical works to critical analysis; as opposed to the stupid medievals, who just accepted anything the ancients said. In a historically-illiterate rant in debate with Tom Holland on the Christian radio show/podcast Unbelievable in December 2019, Grayling claimed:

[A] very, very significant thing happened in [1492, the] publication of book called ‘On the Errors of Pliny’ by a man called Leonicini [sic – Niccolò Leoniceno] who had gone through the ‘Natural History’ of Pliny and they discovered many, many, many errors there. And this was in itself revolutionary because for so long people had looked at authorities … the fact that so few people were literate that things that were written, scriptures – “it is written and therefore has great authority”. And in the Renaissance, you had the repudiation of that and the insistence that we should look again and think again and make use of our own powers. That’s what led eventually to the liberation of the European mind from efforts to control it by dogma.

Except this is largely nonsense. To begin with, while medieval scholars held the ancient “authorities” in very high regard, they never merely accepted everything they said. After all, almost all of these ancients were pagans, so Christian scholars began with the assumption that they lacked a level of understanding of the world that their more recent successors had. This means that while Aristotle and Plato were revered for their knowledge, Aristotle’s belief in an eternal cosmos and Plato’s ideas about the transmigration of souls were rejected. It was well established and accepted that the great authorities of the ancient world could be and sometimes were demonstrably wrong and so could be corrected. And they were.

This makes it curious that Grayling has chosen corrections to Pliny’s Natural History by this “Leonicini” (sic) as his illustration of this supposedly “new” spirit of criticism and correction. Because it was medieval explorers who were the first to correct Pliny on many points. Unlike Pliny, who wrote about the wider world without venturing much further than the eastern Roman province of Bithynia, these scholars travelled far into the east, along the Silk Road and as far as China and India. And they discovered that the Roman authority had often been wrong about these far off lands. John of Marignolli, a far-travelled Papal emissary to the Mongol khans, wrote in 1348 that the monstrous races Pliny thought lived in the far east did not exist, “though there may be an individual monster here and there”. He debunked Pliny’s claim that there was a race of one-footed Sciapods, arguing that this was a garbled account of Indians carrying parasols to shade themselves – “a thing like a little tent-roof on a cane handle [that] they call a chatyr“, noting “I brought one to Florence with me”. Other Papal envoys to the Mongols, like William of Rubruck and John of Montecorvino, were similarly sceptical of Pliny, Solinus and Macrobius, noting that many of the marvels and monsters found in the works of the ancients were clearly fantasies (see “Medieval Maps and Monsters” for details).

Grayling’s “Leonicini” (sic) did not actually have anything much to say about the substance of Pliny’s work – like Pliny he was an armchair expert. The errors he was talking about were mainly linguistic ones: quibbles about Pliny mistranslating and misunderstanding his Greek sources. So Leoniceno does not represent the radical departure Grayling imagines, but I suspect Grayling has never read any of Leoniceno’s work other than its title.

Burckhardt punctuates his narrative with claims like “[the Humanists] knew what the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote, because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought and felt” and that this, in some way, changed the world. But the Humanists were simply doing a version of what their earlier medieval forebears had done: filtering their perception of “what the ancients thought” through much later and, actually, essentially Christian ideas and assumptions. The main difference was where the medieval scholars had seen themselves as largely inferior to their ancient predecessors (thus Bernard of Chartres’ famous observation about being like “dwarfs on the shoulders of giants”), the Humanists increasingly came to see themselves as the equals of the ancients.

This led in turn to a deliberate aping of ancient styles: in language, writing, art and architecture. And this had the odd effect of making Humanism and Renaissance art and architecture a strangely retrogressive, reactionary and constrained movement. The living Latin of the medieval world was scorned and Humanist scholars insisted on going back to the dead Latin of Cicero and Tacitus to write Latin “properly”. The innovative and technically remarkable architecture of the High Medieval style was called “barbaric” and so still carries the name “Gothic” today. It was abandoned in favour of styles based on the (in many ways technically inferior) architecture of the Romans. Stylised, iconographical and abstract art of the kinds found in the Middle Ages were all rejected in favour of a rigid adherence to Classical realism over anything else – a conservative inflexibility only finally broken by the Post-Impressionists centuries later.

Of course, writing in 1860, Burckhardt can be forgiven for not having the benefit of the great work done by medievalists in the twentieth century or a prescient appreciation of non-realistic art. What is more odd is why modern writers like Stephen Greenblatt or A.C. Grayling, who do not have that excuse, cling to these old fashioned ideas about the Renaissance. Though we can guess why they do it – warping anti-religious bias.

New Worlds

According to Burckhardt and his successors, this new critical spirit of the age led to the expansion of Europeans onto the world stage and the subsequent “discovery” of new lands (despite them being already well and truly inhabited) and the great wealth and prosperity that followed (thanks to the murder and exploitation of those inhabitants by the “discoverers”). In 1860 this was all seen as an unequivocally good thing and worthy of praise and celebration. Once again, however, the remarkable novelty and innovation of all this expansion is greatly exaggerated to make it fit the narrative of the Renaissance as a revolutionary break from the past. But even Burckhardt struggles to make this work.

He begins this section of his book by declaring with characteristic flourish:

Freed from the countless bonds which elsewhere in Europe checked progress, having reached a high degree of individual development and been schooled by the teachings of antiquity, the Italian mind now turned to the
discovery of the outward universe.

(Burckhardt, p. 171)

But in the very next sentence he also observes that “the Crusades had opened unknown distances to the European mind, and awakened in all the passion for travel and adventure” and goes on to mention “Polo of Venice” and his journeys to the Great Khan and then “discoveries made in the Atlantic ocean” in the Middle Ages. So by the time he gets, inevitably, to the voyages of Columbus he has already had to at least acknowledge the fact that, actually, there was no sudden break with a former age of “checked progress” stimulated by “individual development” and some new influx of “the teachings of antiquity” and that this new wave of exploration was simply a continuation of a well-established medieval phenomenon.

He is correct in noting that the Crusading movement did open the medieval mind to a much wider world, but does not seem to see that this movement itself was the first wave of a richer and more stable western Europe expanding in all directions. J.R.S Phillips’ The Medieval Expansion of Europe (1998) details the remarkable period between 1000 and 1500 which saw a far greater curiosity about the world beyond Europe by medieval explorers. Merchants, diplomats, missionaries, settlers and adventurers crossing the Atlantic to North America, venturing far into the Mongol Empire and beyond, trading as far afield as India, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, finding their way to the Canaries and the Azores and sailing down the west coast of Africa. There were no “countless bonds” holding back any of this medieval journeying and exploration and it had been going on for about 450 years before Columbus was even born.

Columbus’ voyage was in origin a solidly medieval enterprise. With the break up of the Mongol Empire and the disruption of overland trade routes to the east, the prices of spices, silk and other lucrative luxuries rose thanks to the multiplication of middle men along the Silk Road and the decline in security for merchants and travellers. So a new route to “the Indies” became attractive for merchants and traders who wanted to keep the flow of luxury goods going at a reasonable price. This was one reason for the Portuguese venturing further south down the African coast, seeking a sea route to India. The other was gold. Late medieval Europe was suffering a bullion shortage and finding the original source of all that legendary African gold while cutting out the Muslim middle men of north Africa was also attractive. Medieval legends of the kingdom of “Prester John” – a powerful Christian realm who could be both a trade partner and a Crusading ally against Islam – continued to circulate, though now it was said to be in Africa or perhaps India.

Columbus was motivated, of course, by the prospect of a sea route to the riches of the Indies. But he was also driven by a fanatical religious zeal for Crusade and sold his venture to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain partially by noting the vast riches it could bring their Catholic Majesties, funding a Crusade by them to Jerusalem. Columbus was not inspired by “the teachings of antiquity”, but by medieval mercantile concerns and a passion for the ideals of Crusade. The main way the ancients inspired him was by misleading him – Ptolemy’s erroneous calculations of the size of the earth reinforced his belief that he could sail west to India before running out of supplies, an error that had him land in the New World by mistake. John Larner, in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (1999), shows how for centuries after the first medieval wave of European exploration and expansion, it was medieval ideas, ideals and legends that continued to drive expansion into the New World and Africa.

The real impetus that led to the great expansion of voyages of exploration in the following centuries were not some lofty newfound individualism gained by reading the letters of Cicero or any casting off of “countless bonds” checking progress. They were mainly (i) new maritime technology and (ii) plain old greed. The Romans had done deep ocean voyaging to India on a certain scale, but their technology had put an upper limit on the size of vessel they could send out. External steering oars on Roman ships reached remarkable lengths and could steer large vessels, but the medieval invention of the stern-mounted pintle-and-gudgeon rudder meant ships could now get much larger again. Added to this was the invention of the mariner’s compass and the subsequent development of more sophisticated and accurate portolan charts, all of which meant much larger ships could take on longer ocean voyages and find their way to their destinations and back and again more reliably. The increasingly sophisticated financial apparatus and mercantile infrastructure of later medieval Europe continued to expand and a growing population provided a keen market for exotic goods. These were the things driving this expansion, not some amazing new intellectual freedom or lofty ideas about individualism gleaned from reading Horace or Hesiod.

Once again, the Burckhardtian claim that this exploratory expansion represents some clean break from the “bonds” of the Middle Ages thanks to the radical thinking of Humanism is a fantasy. It was, like the rediscoveries of ancient texts discussed above, a continuation of a medieval phenomenon. Burckhardt can only sustain his thesis by largely ignoring these deep medieval roots and presenting a distorted picture of what drove this expansion in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

Science and Technology

The high school cliché version of western history depicts the Middle Ages as a scientific and technological wasteland, with the Renaissance as a burst of discoveries and inventions unseen before. The figure in popular culture who embodies this is Leonardo – or “Da Vinci” as he is now almost universally but erroneously called – who is the epitome of the “Renaissance Man”. Bursting fully formed from the forehead of the Renaissance, “Da Vinci” was a totally new kind of intellectual who ranged over many subjects and was a brilliant artist, scientist, inventor and all-round genius who transformed the world with his new ideas and remarkable insights. Several popular conceptions also have him staying one step ahead of the cold, dead hand of Church suppression. In this popular picture, “Da Vinci” embodies a new age of innovation and scientific discovery, also represented by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and, of course, Galileo.

Once again, we find Burckhardt as a key point of origin for this dramatic and appealing story. Like most in 1860, Burckhardt accepts as a given that the Medieval Era saw little scientific activity and believed this only flowered later, as part of his “civilisation of the Renaissance”. Though, yet again, he is forced to grudgingly admit there were Medieval precursors to his Renaissance. But he argues we do not have to pay much attention to these predecessors:

[A]t any time, and among any civilized people, a man may appear who, starting with very scanty preparation, is driven by an irresistible impulse into the paths of scientific investigation, and through his native gifts achieves the most astonishing success. Such men were Gerbert of Rheims and Roger Bacon.

(Burckhardt, p. 173)

So he presents Gerbert of Aurillac (aka Pope Sylvester II) and Roger Bacon as individual aberrations; scientific exceptions to the medieval rule. They somehow managed to pursue scientific inquiry despite the benighted age in which they lived, so they were able to rip off what Burckhardt calls “the veil of illusion” and shake off “the dread of nature and the slavery to books and tradition” that afflicted everyone else around them. But, according to Burckhardt, all this changed with the Renaissance, when “a whole people [took] a natural delight in the study and investigation of nature”, adding “[t]hat this was the case in Italy is unquestionable.” (p. 174)

Unfortunately for Burckhardt, it is – yet again – very hard to sustain the idea that there was any great break with what went before or that late fifteenth century Italy was somehow unique in this interest in the natural world. It was neither new nor localised. The modern versions of the mythic form of the Renaissance are not usually as tied to the uniqueness of Italy as Burckhardt’s original thesis, but still strenuously maintain that the Medieval Period ending and the rise of modern science beginning are contingent on each other. We are told that the Renaissance saw a new and sudden interest in the natural world and a revival of ancient scientific learning and so the “Scientific Revolution” was the result.

But the problem here is that Gerbert and Bacon do not represent two aberrant individuals in a sea of incurious idiots who dreaded nature and were slaves to books and tradition. They actually represent what historians in the century after Burckhardt came to explore in depth: an increasing and quite innovative tradition of natural philosophy in the second half of the Middle Ages, which laid the real foundations for the rise of modern science. The myth of the Middle Ages as a scientific “dark age” dies hard, but actual historians have been clear that it is a myth since the early twentieth century, with the pioneering work of Pierre Duhem and Lynn Thorndike leading to a total re-evaluation of what nineteenth century traditionalists like Burckhardt had assumed about medieval intellectual history. By the end of the twentieth century, a new conception of the second half of the Middle Ages as one of scientific revival and innovation had been fixed, at least among those educated on the history of science, by the work of leading experts in the field like David C. Lindberg, Ronald Numbers and Edward Grant.

It is Grant who has done most to counter the traditional idea of the “Scientific Revolution” springing forth out of a Burckhardtian “Renaissance” in reaction against a medieval “slavery to books and tradition”. In his The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge, 1996) he details how he had often assumed the later, sixteenth century development of the “new philosophy” that became the modern scientific method did not have any strong connection to medieval precursors and was largely an independent phenomenon. But on critical examination of this assumption, he was forced to conclude that the “Scientific Revolution” could not have happened without the intellectual and institutional foundations laid down for it by later medieval thinkers:

My attitude changed dramatically, however, when, some years ago, I asked myself whether a Scientific Revolution could have occurred in the seventeenth century if the level of science in Western Europe had remained what it was in the first half of the twelfth century. That is, could a scientific revolution have occurred in the seventeenth century if the massive translations of Greco-Arabic science and natural philosophy into Latin had never taken place? The response seemed obvious: no, it could not. …. It follows that something happened between approximately 1200 and 1600 that proved conducive for the production of a scientific revolution.

(Grant, pp. xxii-xiii)

Grant’s argument is that the fundamental foundations laid in these medieval centuries were mainly the “religious, institutional and intellectual contexts” of his subtitle, but also that genuine medieval innovations in dynamics, cosmology and, particularly, measurement and empiricism were significant. Alfred W. Crosby primarily focuses on the latter in The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge, 1997), where he details how a fundamental shift toward quantification developed in the later Middle Ages and provided one of the key differences between the natural philosophy the west inherited from the Greeks and Arabs and what arose in the seventeenth century. Galileo’s statement in The Assayer (1623) that the cosmos “is written in mathematical language” is often quoted as an original idea and emblematic of the new and revolutionary rigor of the new science of his age. In fact, Galileo was simply repeating a truism that had been noted by several of his medieval predecessors. The fourteenth century Oxford mathematician and physicist Thomas Bradwardine had stated the same thing in his Tractatus de Continuo, about 230 years before Galileo was born:

(Mathematics) is the revealer of every genuine truth … whoever then has the effrontery to pursue physics while neglecting mathematics should know from the start that he will never make his entry through the portals of wisdom.

Bradwardine, in turn, was echoing similar earlier statements by Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in the previous century. The mathematics of the Middle Ages was pretty rudimentary and it certainly became greatly more sophisticated in the following centuries. But the key point here is that scholars drove to make it so because of the conception of the universe as literally measurable that established itself in the later Middle Ages in ways not seen earlier, including in Greek proto-science.

The conception of the Middle Ages as a scientific “dark age” relieved by the glorious light of the Renaissance is finally starting to be corrected even in more popular history. James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon, 2009) and, more recently, Seb Falk’s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton, 2020) have helped make this more accurate understanding of medieval science accessible to a wider audience. But those whose prejudices incline them to cling to Burckhardt’s Renaissance, like Greenblatt and Grayling, appear oblivious to this scholarship or simply reject it as “revisionism” or even as “apologism”. The simple fact is, however, that Copernicus and Galileo were both heirs to a long tradition with deep medieval roots, not brave rebels creating a new science ex nihilo. The idea that they were purely the result of a Renaissance that broke radically with the past is, once again, clearly wrong. The picture is one of continuity with the Middle Ages once more.

Which brings us back to the great “Renaissance Man”, Leonardo. Or rather to his pop history version, “Da Vinci”. Every school child has been shown illustrations taken from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, with its sketches of a flying machine, a proto-helicopter and a tank-like war machine, and told he represents the new innovative spirit of the Renaissance. Unshackled from the stifling superstitions of the Middle Ages, the great “Da Vinci” was, allegedly, centuries ahead of his time, but his bold thinking, unbridled imagination and amazing inventive powers were a testament to the spirit of the Renaissance.

What most people are never told is that Leonardo’s notebooks were largely unknown until they were published in the nineteenth century and while the sketches and doodles in them certainly do indicate a remarkable creative mind, his impact on the history of technology is pretty much nil. Only some of his often fanciful designs were practical and there is little evidence of many of them actually being built. More importantly, Leonardo was not some amazing new kind of genius who sprang forth from the wonderous Renaissance. On the contrary, he was an artisan-artist of a kind that had long existed in the service of princes in the Middle Ages. These men were expected to be versatile innovators who solved problems and so could be asked to paint a portrait, design a siege engine or plot a complex drainage system on their lord’s estate. Men like Leonardo who worked as this kind of technical jack-of-all trades had been tinkering with ideas in notebooks like his for centuries. Around two centuries before Leonardo’s birth, the French engineer, architect, artist and inventor Villard de Honnecourt also kept a notebook and it too contained sketches and doodles of machines, both practical and fanciful. Villard’s perpetual motion machine, with its seven hammers hanging off a wheel and turning it on an axle would never have worked, much like most of Leonardo’s speculative or fanciful ideas, though his water-powered saw would have, and possibly did.

So it is very strange that most people regard the Middle Ages as a period of technological stagnation and the Renaissance as its opposite in this respect. So strange, in fact, that every school child has heard of Leonardo’s sketch of a flying machine that would never have flown, yet few to none of them have heard of Eilmer of Malmesbury‘s actual eleventh century glider, which not only could have flown, but did. Similarly it is very odd that a period that saw some of the most significant inventions and innovative developments of the pre-modern age – such as the mechanical clock, eye glasses, effective gunpowder and the printing press – still has a reputation for a lack of technological innovation. This is partially because the term “the Renaissance” is a strangely elastic one and can be stretched in various directions to encompass all manner of historical details, so long as they fit the Burckhardtian narrative.

The Perils of Periodisation

One of the main problems with the whole concept of the Renaissance is the extreme difficulty in pinning down exactly when this thing occurred. This is significant, given that it is most often referred to as a “when” – a period in western history – particularly when it is being invoked as a counterpoint to the supposed evils of an earlier “when”: the Middle Ages. Burckhardt does not actually define when his “civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy” was, though the examples he gives to illustrate it span around 350 years, from the early fourteenth century right up to the Counter Reformation. Many popular accounts of it sprawl even further. The essay in The Telegraph referred to earlier tells us that it had “its origins in 14th-century Florence” but tells us it also encompasses “the genius of Shakespeare”, which gives us temporal parameters from 1300 all the way to 1616. Other similar discussions rope in Newton, which brings us to 1727.

But the looseness and elasticity of the concept of the Renaissance as a period gets stranger when we look at what it is supposed to be defined by and therefore when it can be said to have occurred. Both Burckhardt and The Telegraph tell us it began in fourteenth century Italy. So Giotto, Dante and Petrarch are all part of this Renaissance, as is anything that happens in the fifteenth century, apparently, since that is the core of the Burckhardtian “civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy”. But this presents us with a very strange dichotomy whereby some things from this period are regarded as achievements of the Renaissance – indeed, they emblematic of them – while other things from the same period are still “Medieval”. So Petrarch is part of the Renaissance, but the Black Death happens in the Middle Ages. Dante and Boccaccio are in the Renaissance, but the Hundred Years War is Medieval. The printing press is an invention of the Renaissance but the Wars of the Roses are Medieval. So we have a strange overlap or conceptual cross-hatching where some things (mainly ones modern people regard as “good”) are in the Renaissance, yet other things, which are contemporary with the first category (mainly ones modern people regard as “bad”), are in the Middle Ages.

This paradoxical state of affairs can get quite absurd. Here we find, of course, the inevitable and ubiquitous Dr Richard Carrier, PhD. Naturally, this unstinting champion of atheist bad history has views on what belongs to the Middle Ages (which he despises) and what belongs to the Renaissance. And, as usual, they do not make much sense. Back in 2010 the atheist blogger Carrier took up the cudgels in defence of Jim Walker’s notoriously terrible online essay, “The Myth of Christianity Founding Modern Science and Medicine (And the Hole Left by the Christian Dark Ages)”, which is the spectacular example of gloriously bad atheist historical “analysis” that gave us “The Chart” – a diagram that is supposed to show us the “hole” in scientific progress left by “the Christian Dark Ages” and which has been mercilessly lampooned and parodied ever since. In 2009 science fiction writer and blogger Michael Flynn tackled Walker’s essay in a detailed point by point critique, “The Age of Unreason”, bringing to bear a solid knowledge of what historians of science agree about the natural sciences in the Middle Ages and showing, with some relish, that Walker did not have a clue about history. Carrier is forced to admit this in his reply to Flynn, calling Walker’s piece “wildly erroneous”. But he thinks Walker is essentially right and so he decided to tackle Flynn’s critique.

His response – “Flynn’s Pile of Boners” – is classic Carrier: overstated, pompous, self-aggrandising, condescending and positively dripping with the clear biases which make Carrier an unreliable guide on anything remotely associated with religion. In it, Carrier displays a quite spectacular ignorance of the Middle Ages; though given his emotional biases are so profound that he once expressed amazement that anyone could “stomach” studying this vile period of history, it is perhaps not surprising that he clearly has not studied it at all. This does not, of course, stop him from talking about it at length and making grand pronouncements on it. For example, in a comment on his post he confidently declares that the “heavy cavalry mode of combat” of medieval armies “is patently stupid” – a bald assertion which would be surprising to pretty much any military historian on the planet, or even to anyone who thought for a moment about why such a “patently stupid” mode of combat dominated western cavalry tactics for about 1400 years.

Carrier’s many errors and dubious claims in that piece would take a very long article to detail, but the point of interest here is how he invokes the Renaissance. Countering Walker’s assertion that “every one of the the scientists that Christians love to cite, lived during the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment when the Church began to lose its power”, Flynn gives a list of Medieval natural philosophers:

Jean Buridan de Bethune, Nicole d’Oresme, Albrecht of Saxony, William of Heytesbury, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Bradwardine, Theodoric of Fribourg, Roger Bacon, Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, Nicholas Cusa, John Philoponus.

Which Carrier roundly rejects, claiming:

Flynn also seems chronologically challenged. Almost none on his list lived in the Dark Ages. Almost all of them are from the Early Renaissance (13th century or later), not the Dark Ages, a chronological confusion that many apologists for medieval Christianity seem suspiciously prone to. The only men on his list that are pre-Renaissance are Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, and John Philopon, none of whom was a research scientist, and only one (Gerbert) even practiced a science.

Leaving aside the severe problems associated with trying to impose an anachronistic modern term like “research scientist” on any pre-Modern natural philosopher, ancient or medieval, Carrier has made the remarkable claim here that anything after the thirteenth century is the “Early Renaissance” and the period before this century is the “Dark Ages”. Actual professional historians are wary of the term “the Dark Ages”, given it is loaded with value judgements and outdated eighteenth and nineteenth century baggage. If used at all it is used to refer to a much earlier period directly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and is not generally used to refer to anything later than c. 800. So to claim that the twelfth century was in “the Dark Ages” is totally contrary to the very limited way this term is used when it is used at all.

But Carrier has decided to push the beginning of the Renaissance all the way back to 1200, largely so he can rule all but four of the scholars on Flynn’s list of 14 out of bounds: they are “Early Renaissance” and so cannot be claimed as Medieval. This creates some even more absurd examples of the paradox noted above. Apparently Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280) is a Renaissance scholar. But does this also mean the Fourth Crusades’ sack of Constantinople in 1204 was not a Medieval event but happened in the Renaissance? Carrier claims Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253) for the Renaissance. So does this mean it was the Renaissance king of England, John I, who signed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215? According to Carrier, Theodoric of Fribourg (c. 1250-c.1311) did his experiments on the spectrum of light and rainbows in the Renaissance. So this must mean the Ninth Crusade, the Fourth Lateran Council and the Mongol invasions of Hungary all happened in the Renaissance as well, and not in the Middle Ages at all.

C.S. Lewis is alleged to have quipped that “the Renaissance is simply the bits of Medieval history that modern people happen to like”. Even if this comment is apocryphal, it is fairly accurate (Edit: See the comment below by Paul Gercken, who has tracked down what Lewis actually said). Somehow the invention of eye glasses, mechanical clocks and the printing press can all be claimed for the Renaissance and it can be stretched all the way to Shakespeare and Newton, but the Middle Ages can keep nasty things like the Flagellant movement, thank you very much. The whole concept of the Renaissance as a period is generally incoherent and, as we can see, loaded with biases and value judgements, few of which stand up to scrutiny. This is why historians generally no longer regard the Renaissance as a “when”, but rather as a “what”. While the term is sometimes still used for a period, the more neutral term “Early Modern” is the accepted one in reference to the post-Medieval centuries from 1500 to 1700. The term “Renaissance” is better used to refer to a movement in art, architecture and letters that occurred in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Eras at different times in different places, not to refer to a period of time at all.

The Renaissance and its Myths

This more accurate conception of the Renaissance as a “what” is not only far more coherent than the traditional view of it as the period that succeeded and “cured” the alleged backwardness of the Middle Ages, it allows a greater acknowledgement of the continuity between this movement and what had gone before it. As noted repeatedly above, the traditional conception of the Renaissance as a sudden, dramatic and revolutionary break with medieval thinking and practices fails at every turn. Over and over again the things that are claimed as being suddenly innovative departures from the previous medieval norms turn out to have actually been outgrowths from medieval trends.

This is not to say there are not clear differences between traditional medieval ideas and practices and those we characterise as belonging to the Renaissance (the “what”, not the “when”). This is particularly so in art and architecture, which in Renaissance expressions saw a deliberate and self-conscious rejection of earlier styles and looked to Classical archetypes for inspiration. Many would argue that this led to aping of ancient styles rather than actual innovation, though the break with the medieval past is the key point here. This can also be said, to a certain extent, for literature and rhetoric, though here the break is less sharp than is often maintained. But even this reaction and rejection of some medieval norms is, in itself, a result of continuity with the earlier traditions it rejects.

One area in which the Renaissance, or its Humanist writers, are often misrepresented by anti-theist polemicists is in the area of religion. Both Carl Sagan and the Reddit commenter noted above seem under the impression that the Renaissance meant some kind of turning away from religion and superstition. This idea is difficult to sustain when we look at the writings and concerns of Humanist scholars. Or even at the masses of Christian art that makes up any Renaissance collection or catalogue.

Contrary to the way early Humanism is invoked by anti-theist polemicists, it was a fundamentally Christian movement. This should hardly be surprising, given all its major exponents were believing Christians in a Christian culture and were largely very devout believers. And this can be clearly seen in the themes that occupied them. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, and Bruni all wrote at length on the theme of the compatibility of the study and admiration of pagan literature with Christian belief. Likewise, Bessarion, Ficino, Pico, Lefèvre, Valla and Budé all contributed to a debate about reconciling Christian belief with the study of pagan philosophy, with the former four arguing for this and the latter two against. And they were also quite motivated by theological and doctrinal issues. Salutati, Valla, and Erasmus all pondered free will and predestination. Petrarch, Salutati, Valla, and Erasmus argued for the value of a vowed religious vocation. Valla, Landino, Acciaiuoli and Erasmus wrote meditations on the Sacraments. Manetti, Valla, Erasmus, and Lefèvre all made translations of and commentaries on the Bible, while Traversari, Erasmus, and Juan Luis Vives wrote translations of the Church Fathers. Alberti, Bessarion, Flaminio, Manetti, Traversari and Valla all wrote saints’ lives. The idea that this Humanism was somehow a force that undermined Christianity is hard to sustain if we actually read any Humanists of the period.

Apologists for the mythic version of the Renaissance try to argue that this weakening of the Church was a result of the new, free spirit of inquiry that supposedly reigned as a result of Humanism. But, as already detailed above, the inquiry the Humanists represent was not exactly new. Nor was it particularly free. The rise of printing actually meant far closer examination of published work by authorities and, by monitoring and regulating presses and publishers, censorship and control by the increasingly centralised and authoritarian political powers, both secular and ecclesiastical, was far more effective in the Early Modern period than it had been previously.

We are also told, by Burckhardt and his successors, that the Renaissance was driven by a new individualism and was the origin of the Modern Age of the Individual, with previous medieval conceptions of self being entirely communal and defined by tribe, sect or manorial community. This claim was challenged even in Burckhardt’s time and has been substantially debunked since. Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Allen Lane, 2014) makes a detailed argument against this claim, presenting substantial evidence that the principal of the fundamental equality of all individuals and the importance of individual liberties actually arose in the Middle Ages out of the arguments of canon lawyers, theologians and philosophers.

The prettified and romanticised picture of the Renaissance has been systematically corrected by historians over the last century, but particularly in recent decades. Writing in 1977, Joan Kelly-Gadol re-examined the concept from a feminist perspective in her classic essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, Renate Bridenthai and Clandia Koonz, ed.s, Houghton Mifflin, 1977) and concluded that in most key respects’ women’s freedoms went backwards in the period lauded as a great civilisational advance. More recently, Catherine Fletcher has detailed the darker side of the history that a focus on pretty art and learned books tends to obscure. In The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Penguin, 2020) Fletcher presents the art that we all know so well in the context of the violence, bloodshed and exploitation that was its backdrop. The traditional, mythic depiction of the Renaissance tends to ignore this to make the contrast with the “darker” and “more superstitious” Middle Ages more stark. But wars became more extensive, more destructive and more deadly in the Early Modern Period, dwarfing anything in the Middle Ages. Science and mathematics advanced, but so did studies that we regard as the epitome of superstition today: astrology, magic and demonology. The Witch Craze – something else roped into the conception of “Medieval” in popular culture – was not a Medieval phenomenon: it was Early Modern. Yet somehow the term “the Witch Hunts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment” would sound “wrong” to most people. Burckhardt’s mythic Renaissance persists.

Again, there is no doubt new ideas, new learning and different art arose in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. There is also no doubt that some of these were in direct reaction to what had gone before. This was, after all, the period of the “Great Divergence”, in which western Europe developed a culture and economic basis that was to propel it to the domination of the world. But the old fashioned idea that this all began with a fundamental and sudden break represented by “the Renaissance” of myth is no longer held by historians, however much it is beloved by anti-theists. For two good recent books on how and why the “Great Divergence” developed, Walter Scheidel Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton, 2019) and Patrick Wyman The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World (Twelve, 2021) both give excellent accounts of this. Scheidel paints on a huge canvas, arguing that the collapse of the Roman Empire led to the fragmentation and competition that in the long term set western Europe up for its unique success. Wyman’s focus is narrower, detailing the revolutions in finance, military technology and statecraft between 1490 and 1530 that established the foundations of European expansion and dominance. Neither give any comfort to the idea of “the Renaissance” as a radical break from the past and both trace the continuity between Early Modern developments and their Medieval antecedents and origins.

The mythic conception of “the Renaissance” continues to be propagated by popular culture because it is a neat and simple story. Its persistence has been illustrated recently by a spate of journalistic pieces inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic claiming that “the Renaissance was born out of the Black Death and ended the terrible Middle Ages, so maybe this pandemic will have good long term effects”. While we can understand the hopeful sentiment motivating these little essays, their grasp of history is woeful, in that it misunderstands both the Middle Ages and anything that can be called “the Renaissance (see the excellent, detailed debunking of these silly articles on Tales of Times Forgotten and Ex Urbe). History is never neat and simple. High school students and casual readers can be forgiven for blithely accepting the largely ahistorical fable of “the Renaissance”. But people who claim to be rationalists who check facts and respect scholarship and expert opinion should not be relying on outdated nineteenth century romanticism as a basis for their critiques of religion. Once again, the Graylings of the world fail to do their homework.

Further Reading

Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge, 1997)

Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (Norton, 2020)

Catherine Fletcher, The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Penguin, 2020)

Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge, 1996)

James Hannam, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon, 2009)

Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance And Renascences In Western Art (Harper, 1969)

Walter Scheidel Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton, 2019)

Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Allen Lane, 2014)

Patrick Wyman The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World (Twelve, 2021)