The French Renaissance built on the preservation of learning from previous decades. Seminal were the Universities of Paris, comprising 13 state-supported autonomous units, primarily in Paris.The University of Paris, as initially known, was instituted about the middle of the 12th century. It comprised several schools associated with the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the bishop of Paris presiding over the institutions and their faculties. Among early noted scholars at the university were philosopher Peter Abelard and theologian Thomas Aquinas. In the 13th century it presented four faculties: theology, medicine, canon law, and arts. The arts faculty was subdivided into "nations", for the nationalities of teachers and students.
By the 14th century the university had grown to 40 individual colleges, secular and religious. Of these, the Sorbonne, founded about 1257 by the French theologian Robert de Sorbon, became the most famous, being the center of theological study and the outstanding institution for religious education in Europe, especially in dogma and canon law. Decline of the Sorbonne's power set in by the 16th century because of its conservatism and resistance to educational reforms. To compensate, in 1530, King Franc&ocedil;is I established the Royal Collège, renamed the Collège de France, as an institution of humanist learning.
The French Religious Civil Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries resulted in decline of the university's academic reputation, while increasing its political influence, as its colleges led in the religious persecutions during the Reformation.
We note elsewhere that the great French historian, Jules Michelet (x-y), in his epochal work, Histoire d'France, said of the sister of Franc¸ois I, Marguerite d'Angoulême: "Let us always remember this tender Queen of Navarre, in whose arms our people, fleeing from prison or the pyre, found safety, honor, and friendship. Our gratitude to you, loveable Mother of our Renaissance! Your hearth was that of our saints, your heart was the nest of our freedom!"
Besides this generous tribute, a notable aspect of this reference is that Michelet's 1855 book, Histoire de France established the term, "Renaissance". In 1860, the Swiss historian, Jacob Burkhardt (x-y), saw publication of his influential, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. With this explication, the term was accepted into the historian's vocabulary.
But many scholars and artists of this early time thought they were living during a time of remarkable cultural change.As early as the 14th century, the poet and humanist, Petrarch (1304-74), suggested the dawning of a new age as men "broke through the darkness to return to the pure, pristine radiance" of antiquity.
The Italian historian of art, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1577) used the term, "la Rinascita" ("rebirth"), in his pioneering work, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. The French Encylopédie of 1751-72 apparently first used the term "Renaissance" to denote the flowering of the arts in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.
The humanist scholar, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) -- who introduced the young Marguerite into Platonic studies -- spoke of a golden age developing in Florence that "restored to life the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music and the ancient singings of songs to the Orphic lyre".
It was apparently a Renaissance scholar, Flavio Biondo (1392-1463), who first used the term medium aevum or "middle age" to denote the period between the 5th century fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of arts in his own day. But we now know that "dark ages" does not adequately described this period.
Perhaps the eariest renovatio or "renewal" occurred during the time of Emperor Charlemagne. After his coronation in 800 AD, the illiterate Charlemagne sponsored a revival of Roman architecture, authorized copying and disseminating of classical texts, and gathered scholars who planned "a new Athens, only much more excellent". Hence, the clear, round handwriting of these Carolingian copies of Latin texts were mistaken by Renaissance scholars as the authentic style of ancient Romans, and widely imitated.
A second revival in the 12th century promoted the growth and spreading of libraries and imitation of Roman architecture. As Jean Gempel notes in his unique history, The Medieval Machine, The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, there occurred in the 12th and 13th centuries what we should call "The Mechanical Industrial Revolution". To produce food, materials for clothing, etc., yet spare time for prayer and meditation, 12th century monks were permitted to read "pagan" Roman manuals about labor-saving devices. In the 12th and 13th centuries, these mills spread across Europe. (The Domesday Book of 1086 lists 5624 water-wheel driven mills in England south of Trent, or about one mill for each 400 persons.)
But this Mechanical Industrial Revolution waned with "The Black Death" (bubonic plague), peaking in 1348. In some regions, 50% of the population died in "The Black Plague". Many regions lacked blacksmiths, coopers, wheelrights, other craftsmen. Training had been oral. The Church now allowed more general reading of "pagan" books, initiating The Renaissance.
For, in 529 B. C. Justinian, Roman Emperor of the West and East wings of the Roman Empire, had decided that the "pagan" learning of the Academy founded in Plato's name and other philsophical schools threatened orthodox Christianity. So all these schools were closed, effectively ending speculative research in Europe. The challenge was taken up by Islamic scholars who not only preserved the knowledge of the ancients but advanced it in "forbidden areas". (Evidence has recently emerged that pre-Renaissance Islamic -- and perhaps Jewish -- scholars made discoveries later attributed to European scholars in the Renaissance period.)
The most important Islamic advance was to arithmetize motion and challenge the Aristotlean "Law of Falling Bodies". Peculiarly, Islamic arguments for arithmetizing motion derived from analogies in pharmacy and optics. It appeared possible to change magnitudes in medicines and in light intensities, hence, it was extrapolated to motion.
In this "Medieval-Renaissance" period, Arabic artists excelled in the geometric art of figrative adornment. The finest example of this is The Alhambra in Grenada (Spain), a fortess and palace. 20th century mathematicians recognize 128 distinct patterns of "the wallpaper-tile group". All of these appear in the decorations of The Alhambra.
Actually, economic advances beginning around this time made possible support of arts and literature in the Renaissance. As Durant notes in The Renaissance volume, "the profits of skillful management and underpaid labor; hazardous voyages to the East, hazardous crossing of the Alps, to buy goods cheap and sell them dear; of careful calculations, investments, and loans; of interest and dividends accumulated until enough surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh, from the purhase of senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian, to transmute wealth into beauty, to perfume a fortune with the breath of art."
But what Durant and other historians fail to notice that all of this depended upon a contemporary change in the arithmetic used in Trade and Nautical Navigation.
In 1202, Fibonacci (a.k.a. Leonardo of Pisa) published Liber abaci ("book of the abacus"), the first European book to use "Hindu-Arabic" decimal notation in arithmetic (which Fibonacci learned in his native North Africa). The spread of decimal arithmetic made possible the great "Age of Navigation" and "Age of Trading", which followed -- although historians choose to ignore this. (Can you imagine balancing your bank book or reporting your income tax in Roman numerals?)
Here's another advance ignored by historians. Circa 1320 A.D., mathematician Thomas Bradwardine (1290-1349) of Merton College Oxford bypassed both the Platonic and Aristotlean traditions regarding bodies in uniform motion and ratios of speed in his treatise De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (1328). Bradwardine and the other "Oxford Calculators", William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, and John Dumbleton, enunciated the Mean Speed Theorem: A body traveling at constant velocity will cover the same distance in the same time as an accelerated body if its velocity is half the final speed of the accelerated body. They also demonstrated this theorem -- the essence of "The Law of Falling Bodies" -- long before Galileo is credited with this Law.
Also, in Tractatus de proportionibus, Thomas Bradwardine extended the theory of proportions of the great Greek mathematician, Eudoxus (c.408-355 BC), in anticipation of the concept of exponential growth, later developed by the Bernoullis and Euler. (The compound interestformula studied in school is a special case of exponential growth.) Bradwardine became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349 but died, a month later, of the Black Plague. Bradwardine is mentioned (as "Bisshop Bradwardyne") in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in "The Nun's Priest's Tale", line 476.
As the associated Renaissance Chronology shows, the Renaissance began in Northern Italy in the 14th century -- only developing in other countries in the 15th century. Why?