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A. Ancients and Christians

It is impossible to discuss Western Culture without referring to the Greeks and Romans, who kicked the whole thing off, and the Holy Roman Empire that was built from the ruins of classical society. Even though this course technically begins with the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such neat and tidy divisions do not characterize cultural history. What is more, there were distinct elements in ancient and medieval culture that needed to come together to provide the Western path to realism. So we’ll spend a bit of time talking about them in the introduction to this unit.

Let’s begin by clearing up a misleading assumption. The depiction of reality in Europe is most often associated with the secularizing tendencies of Humanism, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. This form of analysis typically portrays the Roman Catholic Church, depending on one’s cultural politics, as the diabolical puppeteer or deus ex machina behind a closed, and highly symbolic and other worldly mental paradigm that incorporated elements of allegory, magic and the supernatural. For those who admired medieval society, like many eighteenth-century romantics, the medieval worldview, with its unified and communal values, was infinitely preferable to the mechanistic and atomistic nature of industrial society. For the enlightened advocates of social and scientific progress, the medieval era was an unreal dark ages that justified inequality; shackled individual freedom and creativity; and substituted supernatural fictions for a real analysis of the human condition.

The problem with both of these opposed interpretations is that they are based on a similar stereotype of medieval society, one that seriously obscures the emergence of realism and rationalism in the literature of the West. Medieval society was neither static nor was its culture monolithic. Its fundamental text – the Bible – was indispensable to the emergence of a modern literature that began to push the boundaries of realism and allow authors to explore the dynamic historical forces related to the processes of everyday life. The Bible was a critical document precisely because it offered its readers recognizable characters that clearly were the forerunners of Shakespeare’s more fully formed individuals. To be sure, biblical literature did not encourage the depiction of a realistic foreground in terms of detailing the events of everyday life. The Old Testament, especially, submerged such descriptions within a sacred history where God shaped the destiny of his people. In the divine scheme of things, the economic, political and social events of the time were irrelevant to the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. In some ways, the New Testament made the reality of everyday life even more secondary by focusing men and women’s eyes on the City of God – the only truth and the superior reality.

While the Bible did not permit a serious literary treatment of everyday occupations and social classes – “merchants, artisans, peasants, slaves” — or of everyday scenes and places – “home, shop, field, store”—or of everyday customs and institutions – ‘marriage, children, work, earning a living” – its characters are much more real and interesting than anything from Greek or Roman literature. When the Apostle Peter denies his connection to Jesus, after the latter’s arrest for example, we readers are witness the fear, trembling and guilt of a flesh and blood human being who fits the image of a modern man in “the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.” The Bible provided western men and women, therefore, with insights that would later contribute to individual characterization and psychological realism.

While the Bible did not encourage thinkers and writers to explore the secular processes of everyday life in the form of political events (unless they related directly to sacred history), or economic classes (although it is interesting that many the central characters in the New Testament came from economically marginalized groups), biblical history was dynamic and depicted a people and individuals experiencing change. This form of dynamic history has no parallel in the works of the ancients. Even the writings of the first historian, Tacitus, are largely static accounts of events rather than an exploration of the interconnected linkages and changes that inform human history.

The strengths and limitations of antique (Greek and Roman) literature need to be addressed before we can begin to appreciate the roots of realism in the West. Greek and Roman literature could incorporate an astonishing amount of realistic description. When Odysseus comes home in disguise, for example, Homer entrances his readers with details of the room, the protagonists, and the scar on Odysseus’ leg. He even tells us what hand Odysseus uses to restrain his old nurse, who almost gives him away when she bathes his feet and spots his scar. Seemingly, no detail is too small to overlook. Homer’s attention to detail, and his technique of stopping the narrative plot, to hone in on some seemingly insignificant details, may appear to be a foundation for the realistic portrayal of reality and to anticipate the back and forth technique of the novelist. But some of the major characteristics of modern realism are missing here. Odysseus tells us everything that’s on his mind, but his mind has no psychological depth and his character has no development. He is the same character before and after he returns from his voyage. The cast of characters in Homer’s epic poems are all similarly one-dimensional – aristocrat warriors who fight, hunt, go on adventures, feast and drink. The society is completely static. Homer’s astonishing attention to details is never linked to the economics, social structure, or politics of Greek society. Occasionally, we may meet with a disgruntled rebel from the lower classes or someone with ignoble motives. But the narrator invariably judges these individuals explicitly and harshly and, even when Homer puts effective speeches into their mouths, it is simply an excuse for displaying the Greek flair for rhetoric.

The reality depicted in Greek literature is all in the foreground and reflects the Greek and Roman preoccupation with the here and now of existence. The entire point of most ancient literature is to ethically instruct or to entertain; it certainly is not designed to put the reader in touch with his or reality. The dynamic historicity of the Old and New Testament, on the other hand, while constantly in the background, has an enormous impact on the individual and his or her psychological development. Isaac goes through a real test and tragedy when the God of the Old Testament asks him to kill his son Jacob. David has a huge problem with King Saul, who he eventually replaces, and loses his providential focus in lusting after Bethsheba, who he spots bathing in the nude from a rooftop. Clearly, the Bible goes well beyond the primitive psychological life of Greek characters by expressing different layers of consciousness and conflict. Characters have a real and dynamic history that changes them totally. In Greek literature, we have a multitude of descriptions of banquets, contests, homes, contests and even washing days (foreground details) without any real connection between these items of everyday life and the character development of the heroes or protagonists. In Biblical literature, we have an obvious preoccupation with God’s plan for human beings (background forces) that obscured the details of everyday life, but God’s plan has an enormous effect upon the character development of his chosen people. This dynamism makes the Apostle Peter a much more recognizably modern character than a static hero like Odysseus.

It is important to appreciate that the characters in the Old and New Testament are more fully realized as individuals, and have a much more dynamic biography, than Homeric heroes, if we are going to understand an underlying tendency in Western literature. That tendency is to realistically explore the individual and the self. To be sure, western thinkers and writers did need to break through the bonds of customary and sacred history in order to focus attention on the secular and scientific in ways that we are accustomed to call realistic. (To many medieval and even humanist minds, the real or the true could only be discovered in God’s plan or in ideal forms that were only indirectly linked to the mundane forces or realities of everyday life.) But there were elements of realism and highly dynamic concepts embedded in medieval thought and religion that were absolutely critical in moving Western culture in its characteristically modern and individually realistic direction.

There is another final reason why antique literature was incapable of pursuing realism to any considerable extent. Greek literature, in particular, adhered to distinct rules for different types of literature. One of those rules was a sharp distinction between low and high forms of literature. Ordinary people, who do appear in the Bible, and the ordinary events of life, which do not, were considered suitable only in one form of literature – comedy. In other words, according to the Greeks and Romans, the reality of everyday life could only be presented in light and elegant entertainment, a huge inhibitor to the serious development of modern realism. Despite the common tendency among commentators on western culture to privilege the Greeks, especially, and to dismiss the Middle Ages, it should be obvious from everything said above that there was already room for serious realism in medieval and renaissance literature, where such formal rules did not apply. The tragic history of biblical individuals, including Christ, provided an essential ingredient for modern realism. Within the divine plan that dominated the weltanschauung (world outlook) of the Holy Roman Empire, there was ample room for the serious discussion of reality. The trick, for all future purveyors of realism, was to separate these real and usually human entities (figura) from the grip of a divine plan and to make their earthly connections of primary importance. In order to do that, the renaissance writers returned to, and transcended, the writings of the Greeks.

A Word of Advice From Your Instructor

I do hope that you have followed the argument thus far. I’ve suggested that Greek and Roman literature, while incorporating striking elements of realistic description, lacks the psychological realism and historical dimension of medieval religious literature. Whereas many authors would view an attack on the medieval paradigm as the necessary beginning of the western journey in realism, this development is actually much more subtle, complex, ambiguous and paradoxical. Appreciating a complex culture means coming to grips with characteristics like ambiguity.

B. The Writers of Romance

It is often mistakenly assumed that the Roman Catholic Church ruled medieval society. The reality was far more complex. Church culture complemented and reinforced a subsistence agricultural society that was based on a formal and intricate set of relationships known as feudalism. Feudalism was essentially a mechanism for ensuring the relative stability of a society where land is the most precious of all commodities. It involves everyone, from peasant to lord, in a set of reciprocal relationships. In return for protection from land hungry warrior aristocrats, for example, the feudal peasant gave his or her lord a significant percentage of the annual produce, primarily in the form of grain. The lord used that surplus to feed a small army of retainers who were personally devoted to him and to employ a variety of other craftsmen, such as the specialists who created the knight’s armour. These relationships became increasingly hierarchical over time and involved an intricate set of rights or privileges, and duties or obligations. As medieval society developed, this method of distributing wealth allowed for the development of a rich culture, primarily, but not solely, based on the church. During the late medieval period, in particular, cultural products could relate as much to the status and consumption of the aristocratic lords as to spiritual beliefs.

One cultural product that was unique to the West and largely outside the spiritual paradigm was chivalric or romantic literature. The ethic of chivalry had its origins in the love ballads of troubadours, professional songwriters and musicians who traveled all over Europe playing love songs at the castles of aristocrats. These love songs, based originally on the folksongs of ordinary people, proved to be a big hit with the aristocracy when tarted up in more elegant dress. Indeed, they contributed to a widespread culture of love. This chivalric culture was adopted by the aristocracy as an ideal way of taming unruly young warriors into something more civilized. The sublimation of love within a chivalric code – in other words, the invention of romance or idealized love – made sense in a society where marriage was the key to maintaining or extending the family estate and where sex had to be delayed until the proper dynastic match could be made (hence the importance of the chastity belt). Moulding all that sexual energy into a positive force was not only a clever idea, but also one that really made a distinctive contribution to literature and values in the west.

There is nothing inherently realistic about romance. Indeed, during the late eighteenth-century, a group of writers and thinkers who loosely labeled themselves romantics used the concept of romantic love as a battering ram to attack those utilitarian thinkers who privileged reality and rationalistic approaches to addressing human problems. Ultimately, concepts like romance and romanticism are more closely linked to individualism than they are to realism. But in order for individuals to emerge as distinct entities in western culture, they and their passions need to be analyzed and described in ways that can be described as realistic. Also, the discovery of the passionate individual also encouraged writers to explore and document the passionate side of human nature, thereby elaborating on what it means to be really human. Finally, the subject matter of love, while occasionally comic, affords ample opportunity for tragedy and, hence, the serious exploration of the individual.

The early Arthurian romances, written in the eleventh century, did not go very far in this direction. The narrative is tight and curt. The world of the knight is magical, fantastical and allegorical. The settings are timeless and, therefore, contain no realistic details that foreshadow the realistic literature to come. But one century later, in the Arthurian Romances written by Chrétien de Troyes, we find ourselves emerged in a charming, “light and easy” narrative concerning the adventures knights of the round table. Ostensibly, the content is the same. The night is on a quest to discover a magic spring of water. On the way, he has to fight for access to the spring with another knight, who he defeats and eventually marries his lovely widow. This is both the feudal world of territorial acquisition supported by marriage and the magical world of fantasy, but its tone and texture are completely different. The elements of realism are unmistakable.

In the first place, in the adventures of one knight, Calogrenant, flow in a leisurely fashion that allows the author to break the narrative in places in order to add realistic touches. Having weathered a storm and seeking shelter, Calogrenant is taken in by another knight “with a moulted falcon on his shoulder.” The second knight’s castle is described in detail “with a palisade and moat all round it, deep and wide.” Upon greeting Calogrenant, the second knight sounds a gong that brings the castle to life. We are told that the gong or “vavasor” is not made of iron or wood, but of copper, thus demonstrating in a realistic detail the wealth of the second knight in an age where copper was rare. These details are fascinating but not as fascinating as the ones to come.

“A fair and gentle made” comes to disrobe Calogrenant of his armour, then she places a mantle of “scarlet stuff spotted with a peacock’s plumes” around his shoulders. She takes him and sits with him “in a pretty little field” while the others go away. They engage in elegant chitchat and display their polite manners to one another. The knight is enchanted, but in a real sense to a real person of the opposite sex. It is his desire to stay and talk to the maid forever. Unfortunately, the knight of the castle returns and effectively breaks up the tryst. The knights share a supper where Calogrenant continues to be besotted by his lady fair: “I will only say that it was all after my heart, seeing that the damsel took her seat at the table just in front of me.”

The fundamental purpose of courtly romance was the “self-portrayal of feudal knighthood with its mores and ideals.” Although these ideals – the values of a single class rather than an entire society – are central, they need to be embodied in the personality of the knight. This allowed the writers of romances to develop the character of individual knights in ways that would have appealed to their elite audience. Moreover, the structure of the romance, when adapted, clearly allowed for the introduction of the casual and intimate touch of the troubadour tradition. Chrétien de Troyes’ work is characterized by its distinctive settings and colourful and precise attention to details. But what brings the romances to life is the introduction of women. Not only are women central to the French and Italian courtly romances, but also they embody the grace, elegance and “naïve coquetry” that appealed to the writers of these stories. Although Chrétien is a master of this style, it began to permeate the literature with charming scenes of dallying lovers whose emotions, though naïve, are real. “Budding love” with all its “initial reticence and mutual hide-and-seek” is not something the romantic writers learned from the Greeks or Romans (not even Ovid’s tales of love demonstrate these realistic characteristics). This is something that developed sui generis in twelfth and thirteenth century Europe.

Courtly realism may be restricted to an elite group, but its style is neither elevated nor artificial. It is adroit, elastic and easy-going, taking the time to blend setting and action and to explore human feelings. Courtly realism may be childlike, but it is also fresh and pure. It opened a little door out of the genre of legend, fairy tale, fantasy and adventure. It provided a little workroom where authors could begin to develop character. The romantic workroom was freer than many other forms of elite literature during the medieval age, which had a clearer political or theological function. The only limiting function of the romance was to inculcate chivalric values, but while these helped to shape a courtly culture, they did not fossilize it. Although Calogrenant seeks and finds the right way to knightly manhood, his world of adventure allowed many possibilities for realistic portrayal.

None of this is to suggest that the courtly romance is close in structure or content to more modern realistic literature. As foreshadowing as these romances are, they are still linked to the ethics of feudalism and a select circle of characters. There are no signs of urban life, a developing bourgeois class, or labouring people in this tales. The economic and social conditions of life that inform modern literature are completely missing. None of these characters are moulded by their experience, victimized by their roles, or inhabitants of a “random, everyday, real world. Even the freedom that romance writers had to explore reality related directly to the fact that they could ignore many aspects of the political and economic world in which they wrote – something that directly impeded the development of modern realism. Ultimately, the romance genre was an entertaining retreat into the land of fable and fairy tale not a genre suitable to a more advanced realism.

In order for anything like modern realism to emerge, it would be necessary to explode the feudal world and expose its limitations, which is exactly what Cervantes did in his famous novel Don Quixote. In Don Quixote, we meet a character that is on a quest like Calogrenant. But the irony Cervantes explores concerns an everyday character in a very messy real life whose value system is completely out of touch with reality. Don Quixote is a tragic-comic victim who belongs to an elite class that no longer has a real function in an increasingly bourgeois world and whose romantic notions of chivalry show him to be an unbalanced character. By trying to bring the real world in line with his ideals, Don Quixote illuminates the artificiality, even silliness, of the chivalric tradition.

The chivalric tradition never really died out, however, and, in another form, would return to make a major contribution to the realistic representation of the modern individual. The first group of writers to begin to attempt to realistically describe the human emotions related to the passions, including love, the sentimentalists, acknowledged the medieval romance writers as having been the first to focus on the emotional nature of the individual and the social significance of love. In a best seller known as The Man of Feeling (1763), the Scottish sentimentalist, Henry Mackenzie, catalogued over 90 different kinds of tears attached to different emotions ranging from mild sympathy to the grief of someone whose lover had died. The sentimentalists sought to understand emotions like love in order to manipulate those feelings to build a humane and caring civilization. They believed that love, in particular, could be used to counteract the worst tendencies of a highly individualist, capitalist and proto-industrialist society. A proper balance between reason and the passions would ensure the bonds of community and repair the increasing fragmentation in a progressive European society.

The eighteenth and nineteenth-century romantics built on the insights of the sentimentalists, but diverged from them in two fundamental ways. First, they focused exclusively on the individual and, especially, the passionate nature of the individual. Second, they affirmed the hegemony of the passions, particularly the passion of love, over the rationalism and realism that they found so insipid and limiting. The romantics invented a new concept of art and culture that was highly elitist, that was removed and segregated from the real world, and that made the love between a man and a woman the antithesis of an increasingly cold, clinical and bureaucratic world.

The romantics also developed an entirely new perspective on nature and human nature. The physical nature of the romantics was never orderly, but was alternately wild or sublime, paralleling the swings of a passionate human nature. Neither nature nor human nature could be confined by the laws of reason. Human nature, in particular, was fundamentally and profoundly irrational. Romantic writers sought to explore and affirm the irrational side of human nature. Ironically, their investigations contributed to the kind of psychological realism that would reach a high point in the writings of Dostoyevsky, and culminate in the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Largely because of the romantics’ objection to the rationalistic definition of humans, writers began to explore and document the characteristics of consciousness. As in their fascination with love, the romantics set in motion investigations that contributed to a new kind of realism associated with internal rather than external realities.

Thus, the fascination with romance, that began in feudal society, directly and indirectly, led to a fascination with the realistic description of the individual and his or her passions. The interest in the individual, in turn, led to a preoccupation with the self and its complex, and fundamentally, irrational emotions. The ensuing exploration relied on new methods for describing the reality of the mind and contributed mightily to the development of psychological realism and the genre of the novel. Despite the hegemony of science and its preoccupation with rationalistic interpretations of reality, the cultural exploration of consciousness was characterized by a pendulum swing from the objective and rational to the subjective and irrational. This new form representation of reality in western culture found its terminus and high point in documenting the very messy nature of everyman’s consciousness. The irrational, and sexual, nature of human consciousness was explored brilliantly in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses, a work that many consider to be the epitome of modern realism.

Joyce’s titular reference to Homer should remind us of the tenacity of the classical world and its archetypes. Certainly, Joyce must have learned some of his attention to detail from the epic writer. But this Irishman’s novel demonstrates a much greater debt to his Roman Catholic heritage in its ability to depict genuine individuals and to use a universal religio-historical perspective to give the stories of individuals in everyday life a more general meaning and purpose. Joyce’s world is not the static and horizontal world of the blind Greek poet, but a dynamic universe where individuals like you and I are linked vertically to larger processes and paradigms of meaning. The medieval world was not eclipsed, but absorbed, by the merchants of reality.

C. The Real World of the Humanists

Before they could embark on a voyage of reality or establish a path into the mental interior, western intellectuals needed to bring together the Greek attention to realistic detail with a dynamic historical conception that incorporated the actions and motives of individuals. The Humanists initiated that process and, despite the fact that there were strict limits to how far they were willing to go, they made a fundamental breakthrough by fusing the medieval fascination with man’s inner life and unfolding with the ancients’ privileging of the here and now of earthly existence. For the first time in the history of any culture, men and women were encouraged to see and know themselves for what they really were. A human reality was asserted “strongly, concretely, and specifically” and we are clearly on the path to the discovery of the realistically flawed self as distinct the either the Greek victim of fortune or the Christian sinner or saint.

The humanists were still interested in the sacred and eternal. Most humanists still believed that earthly phenomena were merely “figural, potential, and requiring fulfillment.” That fulfillment would only come when man’s career or earth was completed and he had gone to eternal punishment or reward. But the fact that earthly life was provisional did not detract humanist writers from viewing the progress of the individual in the world as a fascinating historical drama. The dramatic world that the individual inhabited on earth was full of history and real situation that could be decisive in the individual’s life. The “waves of earthly history” crashed into the “shores of the world beyond.”

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s stop for a few minutes to describe this influential watershed called humanism and its relation to the medievalism that preceded it. By the fourteenth-century, the medieval paradigm was beginning to show signs of strain. Despite its rich complexity, multiplicity of meanings, dynamic historicity and interpretive flexibility, medievalism was finding it difficult to cope with the problems of a society beginning to experience rapid change. The change was simultaneously economic and psychological. The aftermath of the crusades brought closer contact with Arabic and other civilizations in the east, and gave birth to a lucrative trade in spices and other luxuries that was centred on the Mediterranean basin and the Italian city-states. The more general availability of luxury goods, for the aristocracy and wealthier merchants only, gave rise to conspicuous consumption that reached into the Roman Catholic hierarchy. In this dynamic universe, the prescriptions of the early medieval Church, more applicable to a subsistence economy caped by Christian civilization, became more difficult to sustain among the status quo. Many wanted to appreciate the beautiful objects and comforts of earthly life without the fear for punishment in the life hereafter. While there certainly was no crisis of meaning among the upper classes, there was an interest in exploring more secular and less idealistic approaches to culture.

The cultural movement known as humanism emerged in the place where the crisis and contradictions were most apparent — the urban environment of the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Naples during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This movement spread across southern Europe and eventually made its way to Northern Europe. The spread from the Mediterranean to what would be Holland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and, to a more limited extent, England, coincided with the transfer of economic initiative from the Italian City States to a worldwide sea trade based on the Baltic territories. The discovery of a direct route to the Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope provided opportunities for Flanders, Antwerp and Amsterdam to become market traders to the world. But, for a long time, Venice and the other Italian City States ruled the economic roost and transformed society and culture in their image.

At this time, Italy, like Germany, consisted of an amalgam of petty principalities that were constantly at war with one another. Within the Italian territories and catering to the large population of this fertile era were significant cities. The politically fragmented nature of Italy allowed some of these cities to become fairly autonomous and relatively safe, at least as long as they could strike up a mutually protective agreement with the local princes. Sometimes they did more than simply survive. Florence and Venice actually grew and increased their strength, based on trade, to the extent that they controlled the surrounding countryside and intimidated their neighbors.

During the fourteenth century, Florence and Venice not only because autonomous City States, but also, what was an anomaly during this historical period, republics. Not democracies, these republics were ruled by the leading citizens – the Burghers. These were the large merchants, master craftsmen and workshop owners. By the fifteenth century, some of these individuals had become very rich and powerful, and controlled their governments as patriarchs. While Florence and Italy were constitutional republics with their own citizen militias, therefore, they were ruled by a wealthy oligarchy that became the subject matter for a great deal of renaissance literature.

The reason these individuals became so wealthy was because they controlled trade in the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean basin was, in the days before the discovery of a new passage to the orient, the locus of the international market. Now, imagine if you will, the rapid growth of these urban centers and the dynamic and charged life that developed within them. Quite different from the basic tenor of medieval life, these places were commercial centers rather than agricultural ones. They were places to and from which luxury items flowed. The lifestyle of the leading citizens of these urban oases, consequently, became increasingly polite and fashionable. The cities and their citizens were what we would call urbane.

When these citizens grew richer, the question was what should they do with their money? Certainly, they did consume; the patriciate spent a lot of money on clothing, new homes and their decoration. The life of the Burghers soon caught on with the local aristocracy. In fact, there was a housing boom in Florence and Naples as nobles began to purchase homes in the cities so that they could spend part of the year sampling the refined and urban pleasures of city life. As these nobles entered into the social life of the City States, they also became involved in its political dimension. They inter-married with the patriciate and used their connections to dominate urban councils. The merchants and bankers in the Italian City States – the richest citizens – rose to prominence in their own right. The powerful Medici family first rose to prominence by controlling the banking system of Florence and then extending that control to decentralized banks all over the Italian urban landscape. Merchants and bankers were so prominent and powerful in Italy, for example, that they even had influence in the highest religious circles. The famous renaissance popes, Leo X and Clement VII, were members of the Medici clan.

This elevated stratum of the patrician Burghers put its stamp on Renaissance life and letters. On the one hand, this social class subscribed to the dominant aristocratic mores and manners – the forms and ideas of feudal courtly culture — that are so brilliantly reflected in Boccaccio’s The Decameron. On the other hand, this was a neuveau urban aristocracy, who derived a “well-bred pleasure from life’s colourful reality in the towns. If you like, aristocratic and bourgeois values merged in the literary products of the Italian City States and urban centers in feudal societies like France. Class separations, while still in place, were relaxed enough to allow new and more realistic characters to strut their stuff in literature. Truly bourgeois types were not held in particularly high esteem, but they and there values are present. There is more social intercourse between social groups and more opportunity to depict a wider range of social life.

The famous cultural historian, Erich Auerbach points to the interest in narrative tales and the elevation of narrative – formerly the realm of folk tales or crude jokes – as a sign that Renaissance writers were willing to explore a broader and more nuanced social world, particularly in works that revolved around love and sexual interaction. Writers like Boccaccio began to give this world a distinctive and appealing shape by applying the classical rhetorical tradition (an elevated style) to what was formerly the literature of diversion and entertainment, thereby creating an intermediate style that made the representation of reality respectable. Refined sensuality, linked with the world of reality and the present, and elevated into an art form, allowed a new form of narrative to flourish. The new narrative, as opposed to the popular narratives of the past, was able to handle complex factual data. Its rhetorical form adapted the “narrative temp and level of tone” adroitly to reveal the “inner and outer movement of the narrated events” – thus simultaneously permitting the more realistic and dramatic presentation of literature. We are in the world of the novella but we are on the way to the novel.

Bourgeois values permeate, but do not dominate, the Renaissance world. In fact, for aristocrat and patrician alike, bourgeois values are tainted, precisely because they bring the self and its selfish values to the fore. Despite the fact that the Italian City States rose to prominence through commerce and marketplace values, the leading citizens of those societies, and their humanist representatives, continually registered warnings about the evils of excessive materialism and greed. Fundamentally medieval men and women were confronted with and concerned about the corruptive effects of luxury.

The reaction to these developments took various forms, eventually leading to a Protestant Reformation. Protestants objected to the increasing wealth and worldliness of the Roman Catholic Church and called for a return to a more simple kind of Christianity. Early Protestantism was extremely austere and its focus was distinctly otherworldly – certainly not a laboratory for the exploration of earthly reality. But the Protestant Reformation was only one possible solution to the dilemma faced by medieval men and women confronted with the satanic forces of luxury and corruption. Within the Italian City States a completely new cultural perspective developed that was quite different from the ideas of Luther, Calvin and those who desired a purer and more primitive brand of Christianity. This perspective was known as humanism. And, although in the short term, Protestantism rendered the complete humanist agenda null and void, I would suggest that, in the long run, humanism had the more powerful influence on western civilization. Humanism, for example, was the fundamental stimulus to the development of liberal arts and humanistic studies. The battles that were lost in politics and religion were won in the cultural and educational realms.

Humanism was essentially the rediscovery of the ancient texts of Greece and Rome and the mining of those texts for advice on ethics and solutions to living in the real world. Now, taken in isolation, classical writings would have had limited influence. But, as we have seen, the medieval mind had already made major advances in the exploration of what it meant to be human and, especially with respect to the human passion of love. The humanists, therefore, knew exactly what they were looking for when they sought to read classic texts in the original Greek and Latin. They didn’t want any layers of scholastic interpretation to get in the way of looking for real solutions to the real problems faced by a civilization that was growing economically. What they sought were historically grounded solutions to the problems that beset civilization.

To a certain extent, the humanists were interested in the solutions of the past; that is, they had an appreciation for the historical lessons of the ancients. But the humanists were even more interested in analyzing the here and now of the present. What intrigued them about Greek and Roman culture was that it was grounded in a real rather than an ideal present. Ancient literature was addressed directed at statesmen and practical men of the world. It offered entertainment or instruction for real people. The pragmatic and realistic approach of the ancients was what most impressed the humanists.

This historical and realistic approach characterized humanist arts and letters. Renaissance writers began to compose recognizably modern histories that treated the past on its own terms rather than shrouding it in allegory and myth or subsuming it in within sacred or biblical history. Artists began to use perspective – where images receded in size according to distance – in order to more realistically portray their subject matter. They also began to paint their historical and religious subjects in period dress rather than making them look like one of their contemporaries.

Not only did ancient literature provide the real life focus that the humanists were looking for, but it also offered simpler and more elegant structures and styles than existed in the hierarchical church and ceremonial feudal culture. Medieval culture reflected the values of a vertically ordered society characterized by complex dependencies and personal privileges. It was not easily adapted to a society experiencing rapid change or the men of action who were needed to direct it. The humanists mined the unannotated ancient writings for advice that was applicable to the statesman and the diplomat. From the writings of Seneca and Cicero, they could learn the rules and the art of rhetoric, how to put their point elegantly and effectively. They found earthly, rather than sacred histories that, if read correctly, could provide lessons for future action. Most of all, they were offered role models of individuals and heroes who brushed aside fate or fortuna in order to create civilizations that worked and, in the case of Rome, lasted for hundreds of years.

Humanists were concerned to provide learning for the real world. As such, they had precious little time for anyone who philosophized in a vacuum or practiced scholarship in the ivory tower. They viewed it as their task to achieve the best results possible in the complex, backward, and often confusing state of affairs of real men in real life. Consequently, they saw it as their primary role to influence those in power in the cause of sensible reform, no matter how much they might disagree with those in charge. And they sought to do this in as entertaining and elegant a fashion as possible. Thomas More’s Utopia is an excellent example of a humanist’s attempt to give the English government some good advice by wrapping it up in the form of a fascinating traveler’s tale.

In fact, so effective were the humanists as speakers and writers that they quickly began to attract the attention of powerful people everywhere. Italian humanists and artists were wooed assiduously by Henry VII of England, for example, who pressed them into state service as historians, propagandists, painters, architects and, of course, teachers. Humanists taught Henry VIII, who always attempted to be elegant, albeit sometimes ruthless, in his prose and his actions. Wherever they went, these humanists brought an appreciation for the things of this world.

The humanists still feared luxury. In fact, the so-called civic humanists argued that luxury was the most corrosive force undermining civilization and something that needed to be controlled by patriotism and constitutionalism. But the things of this world were no longer intrinsically sinful or vicious if handled judiciously. God had created the earth and its beauties for humans to enjoy. Poverty was no longer the primary, and certainly not the best, route to heaven. Wealth needed to be used wisely, of course, but could make a considerable contribution to human life. The lesser comforts and conveniences also had their place. Fashion and cleanliness showed attention to personal hygiene and was part of the art of pleasing others. Wines and good food were God given. And human beings were not so much sinners cast out of the Garden of Eden as divine beings created in the image of God.

D. Neo-Platonism: The Ideal World of the Humanists

The humanists clearly refocused attention to life as it was really lived and empowered the reality principle in Western culture. Whereas the passionate individual emerged from medieval culture, he or she typically was a figura in an unreal and sacred environment. Humanism fused foreground and background realities in ways that are recognizably modern. When we read Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, for example, we not only feel that these characters are individuals like us, but we can take delight in the apparent reality of their environment and experiences. The Decameron is unlike anything in medieval literature in that its descriptions are not symbolic but realist and seem to include every part of life in a very real world. This happens despite the fact that Boccaccio’s work is a fictitious tale faced on fictitious tales.

There is a problem, however, in highlighting the real world of the humanists at the expense of other deeply held concerns. For example, if we take Machiavelli’s The Prince at its face value, we can argue that he wrote the first treatise in real politik – the first realistic account of power. What we would be ignoring, however, are Machiavelli’s other longer and deeper Discoursi, where he passionately described the nature of the Greek and Roman Republics and tried to show how these ideal types of civil societies were maintained against the constant threat of corruption from luxury. Just because a writer illuminates the real in social or political life, or just because a humanist educator prepares students to function in the messy world of reality, that does not mean that they don’t hold ideal values. In the case of the humanists, a preoccupation with realism is doubly problematic because, at its very deepest level, humanism continued to submerge the world of reality within in the world of forms.

The Greek philosopher Plato argued that there were ideal forms or concepts that were true and universal. These forms, which included justice, had an eternal and superior reality to empirical or historical phenomena. The latter were only real to the extent that they conformed to the later. Plato’s concept of ideal forms reinforced the medieval notion of a perfect God and a heavenly kingdom that were superior to earthly life.

Neo-Platonism reoriented attention to the things of this earth by re-reading Plato and taking seriously his claim that earthly existence can act as a guide to heavenly knowledge. The neo-Platonists did not question the existence of a superior, truer and ideal reality, but they argued that one could only approach the ideal reality through an understanding of earthly reality. In other words, our earthly life, with all its experiences, was a training ground for heavenly living.

The intellectual framework for humanism was worked out primarily by Marsillio Fecino in Florence. Fecino established a Neo-Platonic academy in the city that would have lasting influence. The teachers at this academy maintained that medieval religion had erred by ignoring the natural world and the human nature that were created by God. Human beings were God’s greatest creation, but they lacked the capacity for understanding God as He really is. They were, however, capable of learning from their own experiences in the world. The only route to God was to understand humanity because human beings were created in God’s likeness and, like God, they were the only creatures capable of exercising free will. Thus, medieval theology, the Church Fathers, and particularly Augustine, were wrong in focusing on the City of God at the expense of the City of Man. The information and pleasures of the senses were gifts from God that were meant, not only to be enjoyed, but to lead us to a higher awareness.

Sensual love – the sexual love that men and women had for one another – was not only natural but also the path to awareness of love at a higher plane. Sexual love was an imperfect and impermanent type of the perfect and abiding love that God has for us. Although it is based on the senses, imperfect love gives us a taste of divine love. The highly sensual art and poetry of the Renaissance cannot be appreciated without an understanding of neo-Platonism. For example, a naked woman in a Renaissance painting, completely stripped of any garments, was not meant to be pornographic but a pictorial representation of divine love. The clothed woman, perhaps in the same picture, represents earthly love, still bewitching perhaps, but less perfect or idea. Michelangelo’s fascinating sculpture of human forms emerging from rough rock is symbolic of our divine human souls emerging from our crude physical matter.

What is critical here is the method and meaning of Renaissance art. Renaissance artists wanted to illustrate divine truths that did not negate earthly experience. The mechanism for getting to the divine is not to reject what is human, but to use it as a starting point. Similarly, the writings of many humanists emphasized a learning process from earthly to divine reality. They argued that it was counterproductive to play at being monks by ignoring the experiences of this life. The world that God created was lovely; nature was alternately charming and sublime; women were pretty; human beings were filled with the spirit of God; all of nature confirmed God’s love. But only if and when one realized that this life was but a reflection of a more ideal truth could one be truly free.

So, although there is a fundamental re-orientation in Renaissance literature and art, it is one that ultimately redirects our attention to God through a new route. The anticlerical nature of much of Renaissance literature should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this is still a God centred universe. Human beings have free will, and can use their efforts to improve their understanding, but all cultural roads still lead to heaven. Neither Ficino, nor the humanists who followed him, ever suggested that the here and now of earthly existence should replace divine reality. But they did shake up the medieval worldview by asserting that the path to the spiritual domain was an extremely human one, and that took into account human history and experience. Thus, the humanists were willing to satirize, often wickedly, those churchmen or scholastics who spoke so dogmatically about divine truth but who either ignored the laws of nature or who led hypocritical lives. Thus, they also pocked fun – it was o.k. to laugh if you were a humanist – at a medieval scholarly tradition that could argue seriously about the number of angels on the head of a pin or whether all rivers flowed into heaven (Don’t ask!). In the place of such arcane and mysterious preoccupations, they affirmed the dignity and freedom of human beings.

Humanism versus Protestantism

Humanists consistently affirmed human dignity and freedom in their writings. They believed that humans were creators made in the image of God, and should reveal their creativity in art and literature. The wills or minds of human beings, like God, was completely free, even if their bodies were chained to earthly experience.

Although many Protestants were influenced by the humanist movement that preceded the Reformation, this emphasis on human freedom and dignity was foreign to thinkers like Luther, Calvin and Knox. The great humanist, Erasmus, who lived to see humanism eclipsed by Protestantism declared that there was much in Luther’s criticism of the Roman Catholic Church that he could live with, but the one thing that he could never stomach was that Protestantism nullified human agency in its overwhelming emphasis on God’s gift or grace to sinful human beings. Erasmus claimed that Luther transformed human beings into worms who could only be redeemed by divine intervention.

These, then, are some of the basic features of humanist neo-Platonism. Those of you who have had the pleasure of reading Plato in the original might find the term neo-Platonism perplexing. In Republic, for example, Plato completely discounts sensual experience as something that is misleading and shadows truth. The neo-Platonists, however, derived their approach from Plato’s Timaeus, in which the author demonstrates that, while the hand of the creator is evident in every part of his creation, only in man did God breath his true essence – that of free will. Or, they cited Plato’s famous banquet scene, which suggests that one gradually learned the depths of spiritual love through spiritual love. In these works, there seemed not to be such a large gap between the cave and the sunlight, and no level of experience, from the real to the ideal, was discounted.

Like Plato, however, humanists were never willing to be confined within the limits defined by earthly experience. Earthly experience definitely was inferior. Literary genres, like romance, that focused on earthly, experience were lower forms of literature. For all their revolutions in the depiction of everyday life, the ultimate goal of the educated humanist was to discover a higher and purer truth. The momentum in art, as in life generally, was not to stay at the level of the real but to rise to what was universal. In this emphasis, too, the neo-Platonists demonstrated their debt to the Greek philosopher, who so clearly delineated a theory of abstract and ideal forms that had a superior reality to the empirical and specific.

Despite this progressive intellectual itinerary away from the material to the sublime, it must be repeated that Renaissance humanism re-oriented attention to nature, humanity, and experience. Humanists empowered and intensified a specifically human personality by illuminating the free, creative and divine character within it. In this way, Renaissance writers and artists kindled a new enthusiasm about all things human, and a new creative energy to know, appreciate, and mould the human and the natural world. This freshness and enthusiasm was critical to the growth of realistic technique. That is why our realistic modern civilization can still read the works, or look at the art, of Renaissance humanists and feel as though they are talking to us.

E. Making the Narrative Respectable: Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron

In their search for concepts and approaches more grounded in the earthly reality of an advancing civilization, late medieval society rediscovered the Greek and Roman classics. This rediscovery was facilitated by the fact that many of the writings of antiquity, thought to have been lost forever, now became available in the form of translations from the Arabic. The humanists, so called because they wanted to refocus attention on human nature and the problems of the human city, felt blocked by the hold that the neo-Aristotelian scholars had over university life and religious thought. They sought to bring a more balanced and common sensical approach to human ethics, economic behaviour and politics than could be gleaned from the intellectual status quo. To this end, they devoured the new translated texts for simpler, secular solutions to the issues facing a large civilization. They were also strong advocates of the rhetorical, civic and socially involved manuals of the Greeks and Romans that soon became available in Latin or even vernacular translations.

The purveyors of humanism gave a huge jump-start to realistic representation. Machiavelli, for example, was the first to attempt to describe the real world politics necessary to conquer a state and to hold it against one’s enemies. Thomas More used the concept of utopia to document and condemn the practices of English aristocrats who were enclosing land to turn them into sheep runs, thereby forcing their peasantry off the land. That clever Dutch monk, Erasmus, drew upon the classical skill at satire to compose In Praise of Folly, a work that, among other things, condemned the luxury that had taken hold in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. When compared to the writings of the scholastics and theologians, humanist writings breathe the fresh air of reality and common sense, cutting through much of the jargon, ceremony and artificiality of former intellectual productions. The emphasis on the real here and now of earthly existence makes their works appear surprisingly modern. Certainly, in comparison to their Aristotelian counterparts, the humanists were practical men and realistic writers.

But the future of realistic literature would have been limited without an appropriate form for its dissemination. The genre most closely associated with the advance of realism – the novel – was yet to be invented. Its indispensable precursor was the novella, a form of literature invented by Giovanni Boccaccio that breathed new life and respectability into basically low-class and barely literary narratives. Earlier narratives were narrow, crude and unshaped, with little in the way of character development. Plot lines were designed either to provide a moral or to tell a joke. Even when they contained the graphic elements that appealed to popular readers, there is nothing precise or personal in these tales, and any characterization is simplistic and undeveloped. The only interesting thing about these earlier writings is that they include an abundance of earthly phenomena and wisdom. Otherwise, they lack both formal and substantive interest.

Boccaccio took a lot from this narrative literature that need not detain us. He took its anti-clericalism, which was really nothing new. Anti-clericalism was not a Renaissance attack on medieval society, since it was already well underway during the medieval period and continued long after medievalism was dead. He took elements of crudeness, particularly in the form of sexual jokes that seem to impress adolescents and adults that have not gotten past their adolescence, but that was and always will be an element of popular culture. Boccaccio, like the earlier narrators, writes primarily for the entertainment of the unlearned and the amusement of the learned, although he does so with such elegance and insight into his characters as to anticipate William Shakespeare. More important, Boccaccio’s characters “live on earth, and only on earth,” which is a feature of the popular narrative that Boccaccio adopted and intensified.

There are two respects in which The Decameron presented a literary revolution. The first of these, his discussion of love and nature, marks a real departure from both the medieval and the humanist traditions. The Decameron was also completely distinct from the old narrative culture in advocating an entirely new doctrine of love and nature. Boccaccio described, praised and defended the “instinctive life of sex and demanded its emancipation.” This was not, it is important to note, a recasting of courtly love, although Boccaccio certainly relies on the interest in courtly love among his readers and presents the topic in a refined and elegant language that would appeal to them. The real breakthrough here is that the love and nature that Boccaccio describes is unmistakably an earthly love and only an earthly love. What are we suggesting here? We are suggesting that Boccaccio went beyond the medieval and the humanist traditions by advocating a practical and secular approach to love. That approach was ethical in the sense that Boccaccio was willing to go to the wall to defend the right to love as an integral part of human nature that was suppressed by theologians and philosophers.

The second remarkable characteristic of The Decameron is Boccaccio’s prescient grasp of the power of earthly reality and his penchant for realistic characterizations, which made him a major influence on Shakespeare among others. The narrative setting of The Decameron is intensely here and now; the grisly horror of the Black Plague contrasts with the tales of love with which a group of young people entertain each while people die horrible deaths all around them. The only reason that these young lovers are able to engage in verbal tete a tete is because those who might have chaperoned them are either dead or dying. Even more interesting, however, are Boccaccio’s characters, many of who are living, breathing believable people. Although certain Boccaccio characters are clearly stereotypes, ethical models, or chivalric throwbacks, others are much more complex, ergo real. Boccaccio uses both real and ideal characters to instruct his readers, but it’s the former that are new to literature and that should interest us.

The classic example of a real character in The Decameron is Vinciollo’s wife. She is a truly believable character – sensible, natural but culturally revolutionary in her desire for sex, and ill-treated by a selfish husband who refuses her sexual gratification. Her relationship with an older woman, who advices her to make use of her sexual energies elsewhere, is intriguing, both because of its realism and because of its attention to the state of women in Florentine or any society. Both the older woman advisor, and Vinciollo’s wife, are complex psychological characters. They are not stereotypes or literary symbols or anything of that nature. Boccaccio refuses to subscribe either to medieval or Neo-Platonic models of beauty or the caricatures of women as nags or asexual beings in the customary folk tales. These women represent something new in literature – individuals in real situations being described in detail and inner complexity. This is a remarkable advance in the representation of reality in western literature. It is all the more remarkable when one considers that they are women.

Boccaccio says a lot about women. He claims that they have intelligence and are not simply ornaments to be admired. He advises them against playing dumb – acting like “dumb assess” to attract men. While he suggests that there is a time and place for women to air their thoughts, he wanted to elevate the significance of women as individuals in their own right in Renaissance society. In line with the humanist tradition of his time, Boccaccio suggests the need to explore the human nature of both men and women. But Boccaccio’s men and women are made entirely of flesh and blood. They are a part of nature and its law of sexual reproduction. Even monks get horny, says Boccaccio, and advises his readers not to go against their nature or suppress their passions.

Boccaccio usually unfolds his sexual doctrine through descriptive details and psychological development of his characters. But he occasionally comes out from behind the persona of narrator in order to actively preach on his favourite subject. When a father tries to keep his son away from women by telling him that all women are geese, says Boccaccio, he runs up against human nature and his advice falls on deaf ears. His son is going to fall in love whether his father likes it or not:

To thwart the laws of Nature requires too much strength, especially as those who labour to do so, not only labour in vain, but to their own great harm. I confess I do not possess that strength and do not want it…let my censors be silent; and if they cannot warm themselves, let them live cold, and, driving away corrupt appetite, let them live in their pleasure and me in mine for that short space of life which is granted me.

While some people are foolish in opposing human nature, others are socially dangerous. Such are the monks and friars who attack any signs of loose sexual activity while ignoring more serious offences in the body politic:

But, let us grant that the friar who denounced you was right when he said it was a most deadly sin to break matrimonial faith. Is it not much worse to rob a man? Is it not much worse to murder him or send him wandering about the world in exile? Everyone will grant that. For a woman to lie with a man is a natural fault; to rob or kill or drive him away comes from wickedness of spirit.

In these and similar passages, Boccaccio contrasts his naturalistic and human centered approach to morality with the unnatural and artificial moral casuistry of the medieval church. For Boccaccio, medieval ethics were totally unnatural and perverted human nature. His malice was directed most at the new bands of preaching friars, who received recognition and encouragement from the popes, for their attempts to reform society along more primitive Christian lines.

Boccaccio’s revolt against Christian values went far beyond anything in conventional anti-clerical or humanist literature and marks him as a more modern writer leading into a new age. Whereas the humanists merely wanted to focus attention to the things of this world, Boccaccio is a truly worldly author and, as such, a new literary departure in Western culture. He writing is so anti-Christian that it constitutes a “practical starting point for the incipient movement against the culture of medieval Christianity.” What is important about this new departure is that it allowed Boccaccio to ignore the weight of literary tradition in order to more completely explore the “multiplex reality of contemporary life.” Nothing is too silly, too frivolous, too fleeting (in an earthly sense) to escape Boccaccio’s attention or to become the subject matter for his rhetorical style. The Decameron eschews seriousness or nobility of purpose. Even the love stories that are most “tragic and noble” that are told by the young gatherers on the fourth day never attempt to rise above the sentimental.

Thus far, we have explored the revolutionary contributions of Boccaccio to realistic literature in the West. But we would be presenting a misleading picture of this author unless we demonstrated that he was also very much a writer of his time. Although his realism was “free, rich and assured” in its depiction of everyday life, Boccaccio had composed a realistic soap opera, a series of loosely connected vignettes rather than a unified and deep representation of reality. Moreover, Boccaccio’s free and easy style did not lend itself to noble or tragic forms of realism; as was mentioned, even at his most serious, he cannot rise above the sentimental. Finally, Boccaccio was a man of his time because his writing still reflected the style values of an elite class at a particular point in time. He was an unapologetic elitist and, as such, unable to view the entire human condition or to explore the human relations between classes in is society. Boccacio was even unable to comment realistically on the profound changes taking place in the Italy of his day.

This last conclusion might be disputed by a number of scholars who are fascinated by the urban world that Boccaccio so lovingly described. To be sure, Boccaccio loved urban society with all its sexual dalliances, secular temptations, luxuries and markets, as much as he hated the preaching friars who castigated the worldliness of Florence. Moreover, Boccaccio was an entirely new kind of urban writer, who provided realistic descriptions of a city devoted to business and commerce. Most certainly, Boccaccio leaves us in no doubt that his beloved Florence was a trading community, and even made many of the characters in his tales merchants and businessmen. But we need to be careful in advancing this analysis past the point of sustainability. The City State that Boccaccio loved was not a modern bourgeois society, but an aristocratic, albeit urbane, world. Middle class values had hardly begun to penetrate this world and they would not take on a distinctive form for at least two more centuries. Boccaccio can’t be blamed for not noticing a cultural development that hadn’t happened yet, but he can be criticized for his elitism. It is very telling that Boccaccio’s realism does not extend to anyone that we would recognize as middle class men and women. The most recognizably bourgeois characters in The Decameron are not only the least realized, but also they are stereotyped as greedy and foolish individuals. Living in an urban community based entirely on trade, it is astonishing that Boccaccio cannot offer us anything like a believable commercial character. All realism here is confined to the busy setting and charged atmosphere of a commercial society, not its main players.

We are still locked within an elite and elitist society. It may be of interest to some scholars that Boccaccio at least is willing to describe many of the different classes that exist in his society. Our point, however, is that some classes are more real for him than others. Some classes are vulgar and deployed primarily for their farcical or ribald contributions to the narrative plot. Boccaccio resembles most humanist authors of his time in espousing an aristocratic social paradigm and disapproving men of business.

Boccaccio was a realistic and a worldly author, but his realism could not yet support many of characteristics that we have come to prize in the realistic literature of the modern west. We have now been introduced to flesh and blood humanity, but we are still a long way from a realistic exploration of the human condition. We have begun to explore the outer world of experience and character, but we have not yet begun to penetrate the mental world that gives rise to the concept of the self. We may be thrilled by the rhythms of the urban world and its colourful inhabitants, but we still haven’t got any inkling of the tension between our inner and the outer world.