Death and Renaissance

 

My daughter’s history text suggests the primary cause of the Renaissance was the Black Death. The logic goes that this catastrophe shook people’s faith in Divine Providence, prompting a turning away from religion to a new, more humanist perspective.

There are two problems with this argument. First, in troubled times, people run towards religion, not away from it. “There are no atheists in foxholes.” People rarely renounce belief in God on their deathbed. Second, the Black Death swept through Asia as well as Europe. Why did the Renaissance happen in Europe, not in India or China or the Middle East?

Britannica suggest the Black Death actually retarded the Renaissance: people preoccupied with dying and caring for the dying had less time, logically, for study, trade, the arts, or philosophical speculation.

So what does account for the Renaissance? 

The trade along the Silk Road may have something to do with it: new ideas as well as spices travelled from China to Europe by this route. However, this does not work: the Silk Road was in operation already in pre-Roman times. Moreover, if the mixing of cultures was the key, why didn’t the Renaissance happen in Central Asia? Being equidistant from each terminus, it got the most mixing of cultures and ideas. And Europe would have gotten no more than China.

Some suggest that contact with the Levant due to the Crusades did it; some suggest it was the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, which forced Eastern scholars to flee west.

But that contact of two cultures had been going on since the seventh century, in Spain as well as in the Levant, and all around the Mediterranean basin. Contact with Islam was nothing new to the 14th century. And it leaves no reason for the Renaissance to happen in the Christian rather than the Muslim lands: the Crusades surely prompted a similar flight of Muslim scholars east, and Muslims would have garnered roughly as much from Christian culture by taking Constantinople, Egypt, Spain, and Asia Minor as the Christians did of Muslim culture by taking Jerusalem and the Levant.

Which leaves the invention of the printing press and movable type. This must have made the crucial difference.

Movable type had already been invented, independently, in China and Korea. However, there it was not used for wider circulation of ideas, but to ensure accurate reproduction of the sutras, the core religious texts. In the West, Gutenberg did not stop at the Bible. It was used to more widely disseminate writings in general. Hence, new ideas.

Which leads to the next speculation: if movable type, making books more widely available, led to the Renaissance, what can we expect from the Internet and the World Wide Web? 

They are a vastly greater revolution in the dissemination of ideas and information; on a par, perhaps, with the invention of writing itself.