Our continually growing knowledge of the middle ages has thrown the Renaissance into a very different perspective from that in which it was once viewed. Less and less are the centuries pre ceding the I5th seen as the "Dark Ages" in contrast to the sud den sunrise of modern times. Indeed, many scholars now speak of a Carolingian Renaissance in the 8th century, an Ottonian Renaissance in the loth, and of the Renaissance of the 12th cen tury, in order to emphasize the constant stream of light and progress throughout the millennium once regarded as a long night of gloom and decadence. On the other hand, many scholars have emphasized even more than did Symonds the extreme gradualness of the efflorescence of the Italian Renaissance and the long per sistence in it of mediaeval and Germanic elements. The extreme position is taken by Mr. Henry 0. Taylor, who is so impressed by the slowness of the transition from mediaeval to modern times that he would abolish the term "Renaissance" altogether. This proposal, however, has commended itself to few other scholars; there was a re-birth of the human mind in the isth century, though it was not so sudden and decisive as once thought.
In another way our view of the Renaissance has been greatly modified by the economic historians who have stressed the ma terial antecedents of the great political and intellectual movements of the 14th, 15th and i6th centuries. Symonds, like nearly all his contemporaries, wrote almost as if the change in the mental habit of the race were a first cause, unexplained by any alteration in social conditions. But it is now generally accepted that the in tellectual change was but the natural result of material conditions altered by the growth of wealth, of commerce, and of city com munities. The humanists and artists were dwellers in the cities and in the marts of trade ; their patrons were largely found in the newly powerful bourgeoisie of the Italian and German cities. Of course the Renaissance had its intellectual as well as its ma terial antecedents ; it was produced by the happy creation in the commercial revolution of a wealthy and leisured class just at a time when discoveries and inventions were thrilling the mind of Western Europe with interest and curiosity. It was no accident that individualism, humanism, and Italian painting attained their majority in the age which saw the invention of printing and the great geographical discoveries of Diaz, of Vasco da Gama, and of Columbus.
Of all the positions taken by Symonds that most subject to attack has been his assertion of the close connection and similar purpose of • the Renaissance and Reformation. Like most his torians of the 1 gth century, Symonds regarded them both as lib eral movements, emancipations of reason so nearly alike that the Reformation might be called "the Teutonic Renaissance." Just as he was writing, however, Friedrich Nietzsche, basing his opinion on Janssen's Geschichte des deutschen V olkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, which represented the Reformation as a blight on German Catholic civilization, proclaimed that "the Reforma tion was a reaction of backward minds against the Italian Renais sance": and this view gained ground until it was adopted by Catholic historians like Lord Acton, Protestant historians like Ernst Troeltsch, and generally by the majority of scholars. They
have pointed out that the humanists and Reformers came to blows, that the spirit of the Renaissance was largely secular and that of the Reformation intensely religious, that the former was tolerant and often indifferent and sceptical and that the latter was usually intolerant, devout, and sometimes superstitious, that the humanists were aristocratic and the Reformers democratic in method, and that Puritanism proved hostile to and often de structive of the artistic and pleasure-seeking interests of the Renaissance. In criticism of this view, however, it has been con tended that the Renaissance was not, any more than the Reforma tion, consciously progressive; rather did both movements find their ideal in the past, the one in the golden age of Rome and the other in the primitive age of Christianity. It has been further shown that the humanists did little in principle to emancipate the reason from authority; they were closely bound by their own authorities in the classical poets and orators, and could only at tack the schoolmen on the basis of the ancient pagans as the Re formers attacked them from the standpoint of the ancient Fathers. In conclusion one may say that neither movement was a conscious appeal to reason or an intentional step forward and away from the past, but that each accomplished, undesignedly, a great work of emancipation and that each created new cultural values.