LECTURE OUTLINE FOR HISTORY 204

                                                                       Prof. Martha Carlin

                                                                       Week 15: Tuesday

                                DIVERSITY AND DYNAMISM IN LATE MEDIEVAL CULTURE
 

Arts and letters:

    One post-Black Death artistic genre emphasized the inevitability and horrors of death

    Expansion of universities and schools, including schools that offered training in business subjects

    Rise of vernacular literature, by authors including:
        Dante Alighieri (Divine Comedy: Italian)
        Giovanni Boccaccio (Decameron: Italian)
        William Langland (Piers Plowman: English)
        Geoffrey Chaucer (Canterbury Tales: English)
        Christine de Pizan (Letter to the God of Love; Treasury of the City of Ladies: French)
        François Villon (poems about life among the poor in Paris: French)

    Rise of humanist education, based on classical languages, literature, and arts, and led by
         Italian scholar Francesco Petrarch

    Revival of realistic portraiture and of classicizing art and architecture

    Philosophy:
        Rise of humanism, celebrating human potential (e.g., in Pico della Mirandola's essay,
           On the Dignity of Man)
        Destruction of  the Thomistic synthesis of  revelation and reason (led by English Franciscan
            William of Ockham) led to concepts of:
                Faith unfettered by logic
                Scientific inquiry unfettered by faith

The new technologies:

    Paper:
        Spread to Europe in 10th cent. from China via Islamic world; paper production, using linen rags,
            began in Christian Europe in 13th cent.
    Horizontal loom:
        First appeared in Europe in 11th cent.; mechanized in 12th cent. (probably from Chinese model)
    Windmills:
        Vertical or "post" windmills were a European invention; they are first mentioned c. 1185 in England
    Magnetic compass:
        Invented in China (first mentioned in 1st cent. AD); reached Europe in 12th cent.
    Spectacles:
        Invented in Florence in 1285 or a few years later. These were convex lenses, of help only to the
        far-sighted. Concave lenses of use to the near-sighted were developed in the 16th century.
    Gunpowder weapons:
        Gunpowder was invented in China; cannon were first used in Europe in the 1320s, and underwent
         rapid development thereafter.   (Click here to see an English "bombarde" used in France in 1434, and its
         stone cannonballs.)
    Printing press:
         Press with movable type was invented in Germany in the 1450s.  By 1500, more than 40,000
         different titles had been published by more than 1,000 printers, for a total of 8-10 million copies.

 
 

                                                                       Thursday:  REVIEW