Unit Summary

This unit investigates religious, cultural, and intellectual changes in the period from 1500 to 1750. Students see the impact of new information flowing into Europe from the “discoveries” in the Americas as a more critical factor in reshaping European thought than the cultural movement of the Renaissance. While the Reformation was a critically important development in Christianity, other world religions continued to change and spread in this period as well. To reflect this new historiography, this unit focuses on two strands, religion and cultural and intellectual developments, both in the world context.

There was only one Church in Western Europe, headed by the Pope in Rome, but that there were other Christian churches elsewhere, such as the Orthodox churches.

By the early sixteenth century, criticism of the clerical and institutional practices of the Catholic Church (e.g., the selling of indulgences and corruption by the clergy) was extensive. Martin Luther not only criticized these practices, but also fundamental doctrines such as the validity of five of the seven sacraments and the need for clergy and good works to achieve salvation. He created a new theology that Christian religious practice be strictly guided by knowledge from within the Bible alone and that salvation was justified by ‘faith alone.’ A generation later, John Calvin argued for predestination, whereby those elected by God were certain of salvation. The distinctions between Lutheranism and Calvinism were significant and led to many separate denominations within Protestantism. The Catholic Reformation in response to Protestantism transformed the Roman Church as well, especially in its practices. All churches stressed education, understanding of doctrine, and social discipline for lay people.

The Reformation had dramatic effects on European people. All of the new denominations, Catholic and Protestant, were intolerant of each other and would not allow believers from another denomination to coexist with their believers. Mobs of ordinary people sometimes fought over religious differences. The rulers of states chose one denomination and required all the people living in the state to belong to that denomination. For example, if Calvinists found themselves living in a Lutheran state, they had either to hide their belief or move to another country. The threat of Protestantism added more fuel to the already growing religious persecution in Spain, which had expelled the Jews in 1492. Spain expelled all Muslims (Moors) between 1500 and 1614 and persecuted converts and dissenters in the Spanish Inquisition. Spanish identity became associated with Roman Catholic belief and a strong sense of the Spanish mission to protect and spread it, which showed also in the strenuous and successful efforts of the Spanish to convert the local people in their Latin American colonies and the Philippines. Protestant states were also intolerant and executed Catholics and members of other Protestant denominations. In addition, state authorities executed 50,000 people, ¾ of them women, as witches who had sworn loyalty to the devil.

Whereas the Catholic Church insisted that priests and nuns remain celibate (unmarried), the new Protestant churches permitted their clergy to marry. In a few radical Protestant sects, women sometimes became leaders in church organization and propagation. However, male clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, generally agreed that even though men and women are equal in the sight of God women should bow to the will of their fathers and husbands in religious and intellectual matters.

Religious differences shaped European divisions for the rest of the early modern era. Most of northwestern Europe, such as England, the Netherlands, the northern German lands, and Scandinavia, became Protestant, while most of southwestern Europe, such as France, Spain, the southern German lands, and Italy, remained loyal to Rome. Religious differences led to wars between Spain and England, the revolt of the Netherlands, the Huguenot civil wars in France, and the Thirty Years War in Germany, which ended in 1648. By that time, after 150 years of religious warfare, many Europeans were calling for religious toleration to bring an end to religious violence.

The expansion of global communications facilitated the further expansion of major world religions, notably Christianity in the Americas and Southeast Asia, Islam around the Indian Ocean rim, and Theravada Buddhism from Sri Lanka to Southeast Asia. The Christian reformation played a significant role in motivating colonization of the Americas. European missionaries, especially Catholic missionary orders, spread reformed Christianity in Africa and Asia during the early modern period.

A new world religion, Sikhism, was founded in 1469 in South Asia. Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak, a social reformer who challenged the authority of the Brahmins and the caste order. Students learn about the Sikh Scripture (Guru Granth Sahib), articles of faith, the turban, and Sikh history. Guru Nanak taught that all human beings are equal and can realize the divine within them without any human intermediaries or priests. Sikhs believe that each individual can realize the divine on his or her own through devotion to God, truthful living, and service to humanity. The three basic principles of Sikhism are honest living, sharing with the needy, and praying to one God. With the addition of Sikhism, there were now four major religions of indigenous origin. While relations between people of different religions were often peaceful, generally, most Muslim rulers persecuted Sikhs as well as Hindus and Jains. Other Mughal rulers, most notably Akbar, encouraged and accelerated the blending of Hindu and Islamic beliefs as well as architectural and artistic forms.

Religious enthusiasm and challenge to orthodoxy in the early modern period was not unique to Europe. In China the philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529) initiated a reform of neo-Confucian teaching and practice, which he found dogmatic and snobbish. He argued that ordinary women and men have the capacity to lead honest lives and know good from evil without learning Confucian texts and performing ceremonies. In Iran, the Safavid Dynasty gave support to the Shi’a branch of Islam, thereby challenging Sunni authority. For another example of adoption and adaptation, students can analyze art and texts from Java to see how the journey of nine Sufi saints led to a synthesis of local animism, Hinduism and Islam. On a global scale, religious change in the early modern period tended to promote more personal forms of practice at the expense of the power of entrenched religious institutions and clerics. Religions continued to spread as people sought ways to understand the changes happening around them.

Students will be studying the development and spread of other sets of ideas besides religious ones. The Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement that began in the Italian city-states in the mid-fourteenth century and spread across Europe by the sixteenth century.

The Italian Peninsula witnessed significant urbanization and the formation of prosperous independent city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Florence and Milan. With wealth generated from trade and industry, and inspired by commercial and political rivalry with one another, these city-states experienced a remarkable burst of creativity that produced the artistic and literary advances of the Renaissance. Through extensive contact with Byzantine and Islamic scholars, a considerable body of Greco-Roman knowledge was rediscovered. This revival of classical learning was named humanism. Humanists studied history, moral philosophy, poetry, rhetoric, and grammar, subjects they thought should be the key elements of an enlightened education. Humanism facilitated considerable achievements in literature, such as the works of Dante Alighieri, Machiavelli, and William Shakespeare, and the arts, such the painting and sculpture of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo di Buonarroti Simoni. Students investigate the Renaissance artistic techniques, such as perspective and realistic portraits, and architectural masterpieces, such as the Sistine Chapel. After 1455, the printing press, using moveable metal type, and the availability of manufactured paper disseminated humanism and Italian Renaissance learning to other parts of Europe and beyond. In Northern Europe, humanist interest in the origin and development of languages inspired the creation of new and more exacting Greek and Latin versions of the New Testament as well as vernacular translations of the Bible. This emphasis on exact reading of the Christian scriptures was an important influence upon early Protestant thinkers.

Humanism played a continuing role in advancing science, mathematics, and engineering techniques, as well as the understanding of human anatomy and astronomy. Discoveries led to a Scientific Revolution in early modern Europe. The long-term origins of the Scientific Revolution were rooted in the historical connections with Greco-Roman rationalism; Jewish, Christian, and Muslim science; and Renaissance humanism. European exploration and colonization in this period also stimulated a desire for intellectual understanding of the human and natural world. New information, new plants, and new animals from the Americas, which were not mentioned in the Bible nor by Aristotle and other ancient Greek authorities, led many to challenge traditional Christian and classical ideas about the universe. Scientists replaced reliance on classical authorities with the methodologies of the Scientific Revolution: empiricism, scientific observation, mathematical proof, and experimental science. They created what is today known as the scientific method. A number of significant inventions and instruments of the 16^th and 17^th centuries — the telescope, microscope, thermometer, and barometer— furthered scientific knowledge and understanding. There were significant scientific theories in astronomy and physics, including those associated with Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei (a physicist and astronomer who was charged with heresy by the Catholic Church for his public support of Copernicus’ theory that the earth revolved around the sun; he spent his final days under house arrest).

By the eighteenth century, scientific thinking and rational thought in Europe were reconciled with religious ideas and practice, as scientists justified their studies as identifying the patterns of the natural world to discover the plan of the divine. Many people accepted the concept that the universe operates according to natural laws, which human reason can discover and explain. The development of a culture of scientific inquiry in Europe was associated with its autonomous universities in some countries. In these institutions scholars received some legal protection and were relatively free to study and argue what they pleased. Gradually, European scientific knowledge began to inform military, agricultural, and metallurgical technologies. By the early eighteenth century, this culture of scientific inquiry was diffused beyond Europe through the establishment of universities in Mexico, Peru, and North America.

Newton’s recognition that nature was understandable, predictable, and bound by natural laws proved an important inspiration to Locke and other early thinkers associated with the Enlightenment who argued that such laws and understandings were applicable to the human and moral world as well. The Enlightenment emerged from the Scientific Revolution, and the political and social conditions of the 18^th century.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, philosophers began to employ the use of reason and scientific methods to scrutinize previously accepted political and social doctrines. Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson, proposed religious toleration, equal rights of all before the law, and the Social Contract.

During this time period, most states and empires supported trade as the rulers and elite groups wanted access to products such as silk from China, Persia, Syria, and Egypt; spices from South and Southeast Asia; cotton cloth from India and Egypt; and gold from West Africa. Kings and their officials also realized that trade made their states strong and increased their tax income. Some used their military power to take over trade centers that belonged to other states or to dominate trade routes. As trade connections, imperial expansion, and travel increased in Afro-Eurasia, both conflict and cooperation occurred at sites of encounters. Competition between states for land and resources and between the followers of different religions made many encounters violent. At the same time, people from different cultures found ways to cooperate so that they could trade and coexist.

Of the major regions of Afro-Eurasia, medieval Christendom had one of the least developed but also one of the fastest growing economies. There were few European products that people in Asia and Africa wanted to buy, but there was a large and growing market in Europe for Asian spices, cloth, porcelain, and other goods. Europe had to export silver and gold to pay for these goods. Most of the silver ended up in China. Between about 1000 and 1300 CE, the ships and traders from Venice and Genoa rose to dominate long-distance commerce to Europe from Cairo and other Muslim trade cities in Southwestern Asia and North Africa. During the same time period, certain states of Western Christendom, notably England, France, Castile, and Aragon grew stronger and more centralized. The kings of Castile, Aragon, and other Christian kingdoms of Iberia fought against Muslim kingdoms of al-Andalus for both religious and political reasons.