Changing Cultural Traditions

This is Theme 5, the second chapter of Section III, Changing Traditions (the section introduction and Timeline III open the previous chapter, The Three Orders). NCERT’s opening themes: a distinct urban culture with townspeople thinking themselves more ‘civilised’; Florence, Venice and Rome as centres of art and learning; artists patronised by the rich; printing; a new sense of history contrasting a ‘modern’ world with an ‘ancient’ one; religion as something the individual should choose; the Church’s earth-centred view overturned by science; and new geographical knowledge undoing the idea that the Mediterranean was the world’s centre.

• Links within this book: The Three Orders described the feudal society humanists contrasted themselves with; Theme 3 showed the Mongol trade routes NCERT credits with bringing Chinese technology west; Theme 7 compares how Japan and China responded to Western science and ideas.
• Links to Indian history: the same centuries saw Vijayanagara, the Mughals and the Bhakti and Sufi movements; Jesuits came to Goa and to Akbar’s court; the first printing press in India was set up by Jesuits at Goa in 1556 (Beyond NCERT); and 19th-century Indian reformers were later described as an ‘Indian Renaissance’ by analogy with this chapter.
• UPSC — be realistic: GS1 world history officially starts in the 18th century, so the Renaissance and Reformation are background — to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and to ideas of individual rights, secularism and science. Prelims has touched it through the Jesuits (2021). For essays and GS4, Machiavelli, the humanist idea of human dignity and the religion–science debates are useful examples.

• Renaissance (‘rebirth’) is a 19th-century label, made famous by Jacob Burckhardt (1860): a humanist culture in Italian towns, 14th–17th centuries; historians such as Peter Burke think he exaggerated the break.
• Italian city-states (Florence, Venice republics) revived through trade, with merchants and bankers — not clergy or feudal lords — in government.
• Humanism: Petrarch’s close reading of ancient authors; the humanities (Cicero’s humanitas); Greek learning via Arab translators and Ibn Sina, al-Razi, Ibn Rushd.
• Art and print: realism from anatomy, geometry, light, oil paint (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, Dürer); classical architecture (Brunelleschi’s Duomo); Gutenberg’s printed Bible (1455).
• Reformation: indulgences and the forged ‘Donation of Constantine’ criticised; Luther 1517 (faith alone); Zwingli, Calvin, Anabaptists; England’s break with Rome; Catholic reform and the Jesuits (1540).
• Scientific Revolution: Copernicus (sun-centred), Kepler (ellipses), Galileo, Newton (gravitation, 1687); knowledge from observation and experiment; scientific societies in London and Paris.

After Rome’s fall in the west many Italian towns fell into ruin; there was no unified government, and the Pope, though sovereign in his own state, was politically weak. While western Europe was reshaped by feudal bonds and the Latin Church, the east by Byzantium and further west by Islam, Italy was weak and fragmented. Yet these very developments helped: with trade between Byzantium and the Islamic countries the Italian ports revived, and (NCERT says from the 12th century) as the Mongols opened trade with China via the Silk Route and trade with western Europe grew, Italian towns became central. They saw themselves as independent city-states: Florence and Venice were republics, others were court-cities ruled by princes. Venice and Genoa were especially vibrant. Here the clergy were not politically dominant and there were no powerful feudal lords; merchants and bankers took part in government, and the idea of citizenship took root — townspeople’s pride survived even under military despots.

The earliest European universities were in Italian towns: Padua and Bologna taught law from the 11th century, because commerce needed lawyers and notaries. Law was now studied in the context of Roman culture. Francesco Petrarch (1304–78) saw antiquity as a distinct civilisation best understood through the ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ own words, and stressed close reading of ancient authors — implying much could be learnt that religious teaching alone could not give. Nineteenth-century historians called this humanism. By the early 15th century ‘humanists’ taught grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy — the ‘humanities’, from Cicero’s humanitas (culture) — subjects not drawn from religion, emphasising skills developed through discussion and debate.

Florence, unremarkable until the late 13th century, became the most exciting intellectual and artistic city in Italy, known for Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), a layman who wrote on religious themes, and Giotto (1267–1337), who painted lifelike figures unlike earlier stiff ones. ‘Renaissance Man’ describes the many-sided individuals of the age — scholar, diplomat, theologian and artist in one.

The humanist view of history. Humanists thought they were restoring ‘true civilisation’ after a ‘dark age’ that followed Rome’s fall; later scholars assumed a ‘new age’ began in the 14th century. ‘Middle Ages’ meant the thousand years after Rome, when, they claimed, the Church controlled minds so completely that Greek and Roman learning was blotted out; ‘modern’ meant from the 15th century. Historians now question this division and are reluctant to label any period culturally ‘dark’.

The Arabs’ contribution. Monks and clergy had known Greek and Roman writings but not spread them. In the 14th century scholars read Plato and Aristotle in translation — thanks to Arab translators who preserved and translated ancient manuscripts (Plato was Aflatun, Aristotle Aristu). Some Europeans read Greek in Arabic; Greeks translated Arabic and Persian works on natural science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and chemistry. Ptolemy’s Almagest (astronomy, in Greek before 140 CE) carries the Arabic article ‘al’. Revered in Italy were Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’, 980–1037), physician and philosopher of Bukhara; al-Razi (‘Rhazes’), author of a medical encyclopaedia; and Ibn Rushd (‘Averroes’, 1126–98) of Spain, who tried to resolve the tension between philosophy and religious belief — a method Christian thinkers adopted. NCERT notes that the Latin spellings made later generations think they were Europeans. Humanist subjects slowly entered schools (for boys only) in Italy and beyond, though universities stayed dominated by law, medicine and theology.

Art, architecture and books spread humanist ideas powerfully. Material remains of Rome were sought as eagerly as texts; fragments found in ruins inspired sculptors to continue the tradition of ‘perfectly’ proportioned figures. In 1416 Donatello (1386–1466) broke new ground with lifelike statues. Artists went to medical schools to study bones; Andreas Vesalius (1514–64), a Belgian professor at Padua, was, NCERT says, the first to dissect the human body — the beginning of modern physiology. Painters used geometry for perspective, studied changing light for a three-dimensional quality, and used oil for richer colour; costume colours and designs show Chinese and Persian influence via the Mongols. Anatomy, geometry, physics and a sense of beauty produced ‘realism’, which lasted till the 19th century.

Architecture. Rome revived spectacularly in the 15th century; from 1417 popes were stronger because the schism of rival popes (since 1378) had ended. They encouraged study of Rome’s history; ruins were excavated (archaeology was a new skill), inspiring a revived imperial Roman style — ‘classical’. Popes, merchants and aristocrats employed architects, painters and sculptors. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, sculpted the Pietà and designed the dome of St Peter’s in Rome. Filippo Brunelleschi, designer of Florence’s Duomo, began as a sculptor. Artists were now known individually, by name, not just as guild members.

Paintings and buildings stayed in Italy, but the written word travelled — thanks to printing, ‘the greatest revolution of the sixteenth century’. Europeans were indebted to the Chinese for the technology and to the Mongols, at whose courts European traders and diplomats saw it (as with firearms, the compass and the abacus). In 1455, 150 copies of the Bible were printed in the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg, the German who made the first printing press. By 1500 many classical texts, nearly all in Latin, had been printed in Italy.

Religion’s control over life slackened. Italians were attracted to wealth, power and glory, but were not necessarily irreligious. Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454) of Venice defended acquiring wealth as a virtue; Lorenzo Valla (1406–57), in On Pleasure, criticised the Christian injunction against pleasure and held that studying history leads to a life of perfection. There was new concern with good manners. Humanism held that individuals could shape their lives through means other than power and money, and that human nature was many-sided — against the three fixed orders of feudal society.

Women. The new ideal of individuality and citizenship excluded women. Aristocratic men dominated public life and family decisions, trained sons for business or office and sent younger sons to the Church; wives’ dowries went into family businesses without giving them a say; marriages cemented business alliances; daughters without dowries went to convents. In merchant families it was different: wives helped run shops, managed businesses when men were away, and widows took larger public roles.

The new culture reached the educated and wealthy; few ideas filtered down to ordinary people who could not read. In the 15th and early 16th centuries north European scholars took up humanism, studying classical texts alongside Christian scriptures — but unlike in Italy, many were members of the Church. They urged Christians to practise religion as laid down in the ancient texts, discarding rituals they saw as later additions, and offered a view of humans as free and rational agents (later linked to belief in a distant God who allows humans freedom to pursue happiness ‘here and now’).

Criticism. Christian humanists Thomas More (1478–1535) in England and Erasmus (1466–1536) in Holland felt the Church had become greedy, extorting money from ordinary people — notably by selling indulgences. Printed Bibles in local languages showed Christians that their religion did not permit such practices; peasants rebelled against Church taxes; princes resented clerical interference in the state and welcomed humanists’ proof that the ‘Donation of Constantine’, on which the clergy based their judicial and fiscal claims, was a later forgery.

Luther. In 1517 the German monk Martin Luther (1483–1546) campaigned against the Catholic Church, arguing that a person did not need priests to reach God and that faith alone could guide one to a right life and to heaven. The Protestant Reformation led churches in Germany and Switzerland to break with the Pope. In Switzerland Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and later Jean Calvin (1509–64) spread such ideas. Backed by merchants, reformers were stronger in towns; the Catholic Church kept its influence in rural areas. The Anabaptists were more radical, joining salvation to the end of all social oppression: since God created all equal, people need not pay taxes and could choose their priests — appealing to peasants oppressed by feudalism.

Radicalism and its limits. Luther did not support radicalism: he called on German rulers to suppress the peasants’ rebellion, which they did in 1525. Radical ideas survived among persecuted French Protestants, who claimed a people’s right to remove an oppressive ruler. Eventually in France, as elsewhere, Protestants were allowed to worship as they chose. In England the rulers ended the connection with the Pope; the monarch became head of the Church.

Catholic reform. The Catholic Church reformed itself from within: churchmen in Spain and Italy stressed a simple life and service to the poor. In Spain Ignatius Loyola, to combat Protestantism, founded the Society of Jesus in 1540; the Jesuits’ mission was to serve the poor and widen their knowledge of other cultures.

The Christian idea of man as a sinner was also questioned by scientists. NCERT writes that Christians had believed the earth was a sinful place whose burden of sin kept it immobile at the centre of the universe, with the celestial planets moving around it. Copernicus (1473–1543), a contemporary of Luther, asserted that the planets, including the earth, revolve around the sun. A devout Christian, he feared traditionalist clergy’s reaction and did not want his manuscript, De revolutionibus, printed; on his deathbed he gave it to his follower Joachim Rheticus. Acceptance took time: more than half a century later Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) bridged ‘heaven’ and earth. Kepler showed that planets move round the sun in ellipses, not circles; Galileo confirmed a dynamic world; the revolution climaxed in Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation.

Reading the universe. Galileo remarked that the Bible, which lights the road to heaven, says little about how the heavens work. These thinkers showed that knowledge, as distinct from belief, rests on observation and experiment; physics, chemistry and biology expanded rapidly — what historians label the Scientific Revolution. For sceptics, Nature began to replace God as the source of creation; even believers spoke of a distant God who does not directly regulate the material world. Scientific societies spread this culture in public: the Paris Academy (NCERT: 1670) and London’s Royal Society (1662) held lectures and public experiments.

Was there a sharp break and rebirth of Greek and Roman ideas? Was the 12th–13th century dark? Recent writers like Peter Burke of England suggest Burckhardt exaggerated: the word implies Greek and Roman civilisation was reborn and that scholars replaced a Christian world-view with a pre-Christian one — both exaggerations. Earlier scholars knew Greek and Roman culture; religion remained very important; many ‘Renaissance’ elements go back to the 12th and 13th centuries; and some historians see a similar literary and artistic blossoming in 9th-century France.

Nor was the change shaped only by Greece and Rome. Asian technologies and skills had moved far beyond what the Greeks and Romans knew; Islam’s expansion and the Mongol conquests linked Asia and North Africa with Europe in trade and learning. Europeans learnt from India, Arabia, Iran, Central Asia and China — debts long unacknowledged because the history was first written from a Europe-centred viewpoint.

What did change. The private sphere (family, personal religion) and the public sphere (government, formal religion) began to separate. A person was not merely a member of one of the ‘three orders’ but an individual in his own right; an artist was known for himself, not just his guild. In the 18th century this sense of the individual would take political form in the belief that all individuals had equal political rights. And Europe’s regions developed separate identities based on language: the continent once united by Rome, Latin and Christianity was dissolving into states, each united by a common language.

Q1–4 are brief answers (about 100 words); Q5–6 are short essays (250–300 words). Try each first.

Numbers

One-liners

• ‘Renaissance’ is Burckhardt’s 19th-century interpretation, now qualified by historians like Burke.
• Italian city-states: trade, citizenship, merchants in power — no dominant clergy or lords.
• Petrarch: read the ancients in their own words.
• Greek learning came to Italy partly through Arabic.
• Realism = anatomy + geometry + light + oil paint.
• Printing (1455) carried humanism across the Alps.
• Humanist individualism largely excluded women.
• Indulgences, greed and a forged Donation fed the Reformation.
• Luther: faith alone, no priestly middlemen — but he opposed the peasants’ revolt.
• The Catholic Church reformed itself; Loyola founded the Jesuits (1540).
• Copernicus put the sun at the centre; Newton explained why things move.
• Knowledge from observation and experiment — the Scientific Revolution.

Traps to avoid

• Florence and Venice were republics; Venice’s council was an aristocracy of lineage, not a democracy of all.
• Avicenna = Ibn Sina (Persian, of Bukhara); Averroes = Ibn Rushd (Spain); Rhazes = al-Razi.
• ‘Humanism’ and ‘Renaissance’ are 19th-century labels.
• Brunelleschi was born in 1377 (NCERT prints 1337); Gutenberg died in 1468 (NCERT prints 1458).
• Tyndale’s English New Testament was 1526, not 1506.
• Kepler’s ellipses came in Astronomia Nova (1609), not the Cosmographical Mystery.
• Luther opposed the 1525 peasants’ rebellion; the Anabaptists were the radicals.
• Zwingli and Calvin in Switzerland; Erasmus in Holland; More in England.
• Jesuits: Ignatius Loyola, Spain, 1540; Francis Xavier died off China, not in Goa.
• The Paris Academy appears as 1670 and 1673 in NCERT; it was founded in 1666.
• Vesalius was not literally the first to dissect a human body; his Fabrica (1543) was the landmark.
• Printing technology came from China (NCERT); Gutenberg built Europe’s first press.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• The Jesuits: UPSC 2021 asked about St Francis Xavier — a founding member of the Society of Jesus (correct), whose feast is celebrated in Goa (correct), but who did not die in Goa (he died off China in 1552; his remains are in Goa). Key: statements 1 and 3. This chapter supplies the Jesuits’ founding (Loyola, 1540); the Goa details are Beyond NCERT.
• Likely areas: name–work pairs (Machiavelli–The Prince, Castiglione–The Courtier, More–Utopia, Pico–On the Dignity of Man, Burckhardt–The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy); artist–work pairs; Luther 1517; Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton; Latin names of Muslim scholars; the Gregorian calendar (1582).
• Related questions that belong elsewhere: ‘who first stated the earth was spherical’ (2001, key Aristotle — debatable, since earlier Greek thinkers are also credited) and ‘who anticipated Newton on gravity’ (1995, Brahmagupta) are science/ancient-India questions, not this chapter’s core.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• No Mains question has been asked directly on the European Renaissance or Reformation. UPSC 2019 asked about the 19th-century ‘Indian Renaissance’ and national identity — a modern-India question, but this chapter explains the European model the term borrows and its critics (Burke: no sharp break; Europe-centred history).
• Use the chapter as background for GS1 modern world history: individual rights and the separation of private and public spheres (→ Enlightenment, French Revolution); the printing revolution (→ public opinion); language-based states (→ nationalism); the Scientific Revolution (→ Industrial Revolution).
• Essays and GS4: Machiavelli’s realism versus ethical governance; humanism and human dignity; science and faith as a historical debate; women’s exclusion from new freedoms; acknowledging non-European contributions to knowledge.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.