2. By about 1450, the Renaissance is finally starting to
move outside of Italy.
• The plague has passed.
• The Hundred Years War is over.
• More money to be had for other goods.
3. The tone of the Northern Renaissance, however, is
different from what was seen in Italy.
• While wealthy merchants and rich, independent city-
states led the way in Italy, this was not the case in the
north.
• Due in part to the plague and the Hundred Years
War, northern Europe had strong centralized power
structures in the form of monarchies. They didn’t
have uppity city-states.
• Thus, it was mainly the kings and some nobles who
were responsible for the Renaissance’s spread there,
not wealthy patron families.
• It’s also more religious there.
• While the Italian Renaissance was not strictly
secular, it was more so than the Northern flavor.
4. A big mover and shaker was France’s King Francis I, who
reigned from 1515-1547.
• Francis became known as
the Father and Restorer
of Letters. He was quite
the humanist.
• The two previous French
kings had warred with
(and therefore interacted
with) Italy, but Francis
was the first one to really
embrace the new ideas.
5. • He sponsored a lot of art, and even lured Leonardo de
Vinci to France.
• It was near the end of de Vinci’s life and he wasn’t
that productive, but he brought his stuff with him –
including such pieces as the Mona Lisa, which is
France has it and not Italy.
• He was a great reader, a good poet, and greatly
expanded the royal library. He even opened it up to all
scholars.
• He did a lot with architecture.
16. Literature
• Writing also goes humanist, but, like with the rest, with
a Christian bent, giving rise to Christian Humanism.
• Human freedom and individualism are compatible
with Christianity.
• Human existence isn’t valued merely in itself.
• You see this a lot with Erasmus.
17. Guttenberg and the printing press
• The printing press is one of the greatest inventions in
history.
• It was invented by Johann Gutenberg.
• Previously, literary works had to be transcribed by
hand, usually by monks.
• It was tedious, time-consuming
work and made books very
expensive.
• The printing press allowed works
to be cheaply mass-produced.
Suddenly the written word could
be accessible to the masses.
• In three years, a monk could
produce one Bible… Gutenberg,
18.
19. • The press actually derived from a modified olive press.
• It’s big thing was the durable types used and the
ability to easily move around the letters.
• One of the first projects Gutenberg undertook was
printing 200 copies of the Bible with 42 lines per page.
Some were on vellum.
• There are currently 11 complete copies on vellum
and 48 relatively intact copies on paper. They can
be sold for millions (but aren’t sold that often).
