Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

Étienne Dolet was the best-known ‘martyr of the book’, a writer-turned-bookseller-and-printer, who worked for Gryphe as well as writing his own books and carrying on a dispute with Erasmus. But in 1542 he published several suspect religious works and when the authorities, alarmed, searched his premises they found a copy of a book by Calvin. Dolet was burned at the stake in August 1544, along with his books.

Copyright was introduced around the middle of the seventeenth century, beginning in England.

Nicholas Clénard’s Greek grammar of 1564 and his edition of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, published in 15661567, were both released in edition sizes of 2,500. Some Bibles in Holland reached 3,000–4,000 copies.

As early as 1475 the University of Cologne received a licence from the pope to censor printers, publishers and even readers of condemned books.

In 1501 Pope Alexander VI published his bull Inter multiplices, which forbade the printing of any book in Germany without the permission of the ecclesiastical powers.

It has been calculated that no fewer than 20 million books were printed before 1500.127

For example, in Paris, out of the 88 titles produced in 1501 only 8 were in French; but by 1530, when 456 titles were published, 121 were in the vernacular, a rise from 9 per cent to 26 per cent.

The death of Latin was slow. Descartes wrote the Discours de la Méthode in French but his correspondence was usually in Latin. It was still imperative to write in Latin if one wanted to address a European audience. Latin did not finally succumb until the seventeenth century, after which French became the language of science, philosophy and diplomacy, when every educated European had to know French and when books in French were sold all over Europe.

He says that 33 per cent of boys of school age had a rudimentary literacy, 12 per cent of girls, and that overall about 23 per cent of the inhabitants of Venice were literate by 1587.8

The first figure in Renaissance humanism is Petrarch (1304–1374). It was Petrarch’s achievement to be the first person to recognise the ‘dark ages’, that the thousand years more or less before he lived had been a period of decline, since the grandeur of ancient Rome and, before that, classical Greece. Petrarch’s poem on Scipio Africanus, in looking back, also forecast a turning point in history.

In Renaissance philosophy, Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525) was typical. He concluded that Aristotelianism could not prove the independent existence of the soul and though he did not deny the soul’s immortality, he thought that the question was insoluble and that, therefore, a system of ethics based on rewards and punishments after death was meaningless. Instead, he thought we should construct a system that related to this life. ‘The reward of virtue is virtue itself,’ he said, ‘while the punishment of the vicious is vice.’ The religious authorities looked on Pompanazzi with disfavour and he only escaped the stake because of his great friendship with Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) who was himself an admirer of pagan/classical thought. But Pompanazzi’s books were burned.

But, despite his moderation, Erasmus couldn’t entirely escape the fight. Catholic bigots accused him of laying the eggs ‘which Luther and Zwingli hatched’ and The Praise of Folly was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, while Erasmus himself was condemned by the Council of Trent as ‘an impious heretic’. In other words, he was welcome in neither camp. This was perhaps inevitable but it was no less tragic for all that. Erasmus had lived, or tried to live, the ideal life of a humanist, as someone who believed in the life of the mind, that virtue could be based on humanity, that tolerance was as virtuous as fanatical certitude, that thoughtful men could become good men and that those who were familiar with the works of all ages could live more happily and, yes, more justly, in their own time.

In 1470, at a public festival in Breslau, in honour of the marriage of Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary, the newlyweds were treated to the sound of many trumpets and ‘all kinds of string instruments’. This is regarded as the earliest account of a large number of strings, the essential ingredient of what would later come to be called an orchestra.

Roughly speaking, in the century between these two dates, 1470 and 1590, we may say that the main elements of modern music came into being. It paralleled the explosion in painting.

Coming to prominence around 1530, the madrigal was the main secular form of music among the cultured classes of Italy.

Tradition has Shakespeare and Cervantes dying on the same day. A more important coincidence is that the novel, so common a form of literature in our own times, was born in Spain, with Don Quixote, and at more or less the same time as modern drama was launched in London.

Unlike Shakespeare, Cervantes was an heroic man. Almost certainly a disciple of Erasmus, from a family who had been forced by the Inquisition to abandon their Judaism, he fought and shone at the battle of Lepanto, even though he was sick, survived long years of Moorish captivity and then in Spanish jails, where Don Quixote may have been begun. The book appeared at more or less the same time as King Lear and can claim to be as utterly original and as unprecedented.

Eratosthenes (276–196 BC), may be regarded as the world’s first mathematical geographer and he set about producing a more accurate map of the world. By the method already described in Chapter 8, he calculated the circumference of the earth as just under 25,000 miles.

After Bjarni had made it back to Greenland, and excited others with what he had seen, a young man called Leif Eiriksson set out to emulate him in 1001.

Nonetheless, his journey added a great deal to knowledge about the East and the History of the Mongols was circulated throughout Europe (the English word ‘horde’, often used in connection with the Mongols, derives from the Turkish ordu, meaning ‘camp’). For his part, the pope decided to send a preacher to Karakorum, in the hope of converting the Great Khan. The man chosen, William of Rusbruck, set out in 1253 and was disappointed to find that the Khan had no interest whatsoever in being converted.26 However, while he was in Karakorum he observed several other

This is why the Polo brothers, Nicolo and Maffeo, decided to make their way across Asia in 1260. This first trip was a great success because the Mongol ruler of the time, the great Kublai Khan, was as interested in Europe as they were in Asia and sent them back as his ambassadors. When they returned east, in 1271, they took with them Marco, the seventeen-year-old son of Nicolo. This journey turned into one of the great epic voyages of all time. They followed the old Silk Road–fifty-two days of travel–until they reached Kashgar and Yarkand on the edges of China. There they crossed the desert and finally reached Kanbalu (the modern Beijing), where the Khan’s capital had moved to, from Karakorum. Marco Polo was entranced by Kanbalu; he described the city as ‘greater than the mind can comprehend…no fewer than a thousand carriages and pack horses, loaded with raw silk, make their entry daily; and gold tissues and silks of various kinds are manufactured to an immense extent.’

The first printed map to show America, that produced by Giovanni Matteo Contarini in 1506, does show the curvature of the earth, while at the same time displaying the new world in three parts–the north joined to Cathay, the West Indies as a group of islands not far from Japan, and Terra Crucis, South America, as an entirely separate (and huge) continent in the south. A year later Martin Waldseemüller produced his famous world map, twelve sheets drawn on a single cordiform projection, with its title describing it as ‘according to the tradition of Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and others’ (this is the first map to use the word America to describe the New World). It shows the Old World landmass as occupying 230° of longitude, but Waldseemüller later abandoned Ptolemy and produced maps which showed Asia in its more or less proper proportions.

a degree of longitude, but again it was useful only if one could measure one’s speed accurately, and that required accurate time-keeping. Essentially, as J. H. Parry has remarked, throughout the fifteenth and for most of the sixteenth century, navigation in the open ocean was a matter of dead-reckoning ‘checked and supplemented by observed latitude’.60 In the short space of about twenty years, in the middle of the fifteenth century, a major revolution took place in shipping.61 This was a marriage between the lateen-rigged Mediterranean ships and the square-rigged north Europe–Atlantic ships. ‘The marriage produced the basic barque, the direct ancestor of all the square-riggers of the [age of] Reconnaissance and the later great age of sail.’62 The principal warship of the Mediterranean was the oared galley, which remained a component of Mediterranean navies until the seventeenth century.63 Its main drawback was the large crew it required, making it unsuitable for long voyages out of sight of land. The other main idea in Mediterranean sailing had been taken from the Arabs–this was the lateen sail. The only type of sail seen on Arab ships, the lateen sail is essentially triangular, laced to a forward-leaning mast and a long yard. Whether or not the Arabs invented it, the lateen was spread through them, both in the Indian Ocean and in the Mediterranean. Its shape made the most of whatever wind was going and as a form of rig it was very versatile and made ships more manoeuvra...

Writing was invented in Mesopotamia before 3000 BC but in Mesoamerica not until 600 BC. Pottery was invented in the fertile crescent and China about 8000 BC but in Mesoamerica not until 1250 BC. Chiefdoms arose in the fertile crescent around 5500 BC and but not in Mesoamerica until around 1000

Moreover, the Bering Strait was not discovered until 1728. Until then it was not clear whether America formed part of Asia or not.

In Sublimis Deus, his bull of 1537, Paul III had this in mind when he declared that ‘the Indians are true men’. Christians defined man by his ability to receive divine grace. The classical definition of man, on the other hand, was as a rational being. After Sublimis Deus, most Christians accepted that the native peoples of America could be classified as human on both grounds.

This was refined still further around 1530, by what came to be known as the ‘School of Salamanca’, a group of theologians that included Francisco Vitoria and Luis de Molina. They developed the view that if the Indians were not natural slaves then they were ‘nature’s children’, a less developed form of humanity. In his treatise De Indis, Vitoria argued that American Indians were a third species of animal between man and monkey, ‘created by God for the better service of man’.

We may start with the position in regard to languages. ‘In 1492 as many as two thousand mutually unintelligible languages were spoken in the Western hemisphere. Of these approximately 250 were spoken in north America, some 350 in Mexico and central America, and no fewer than 1,450 in south America.’

Other ideas or inventions missing from pre-Columbian societies were coined money, ethical monotheism, the idea of the experiment and, in general, writing. There were no kilns–and therefore no glazed pottery, and no stringed instruments. Several of these missing elements–draft animals, large sailing vessels, writing, coined money–would all have limited economic development, in particular trade and the accumulation of surpluses. We have already seen that what surpluses were produced were as often as not dissipated in elaborate rituals for the dead and this difference in economic development, together with the lack of ethical monotheism and the absence of experimentation, are perhaps the three most important ways in which the Old World and the New differed.

‘Peter and Paul had lived in penury, but the popes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lived like Roman emperors.’ In 1502, according to a parliamentary estimate, the Catholic Church owned 75 per cent of all the money in France.

In Germany, twenty years later, the Diet of Nuremberg calculated that the church there owned 50 per cent of the wealth in Germany.

There was a special office of quaestiarii, or pardoners, who had the pope’s authority to issue indulgences. As early as 1450, Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford University, remarked that ‘sinners say nowadays: “I care not how many evils I do in God’s sight, for I can easily get plenary remission of all guilt and penalty by an absolution and indulgence granted me by the pope, whose written grant I have bought for four or six pence”.’ He was exaggerating–other accounts tell of indulgences being sold for ‘two pence, sometimes for a draught of wine or beer…or even for the hire of a harlot or for carnal love’.

The tipping point came in 1476, when Pope Sixtus IV declared that indulgences also applied ‘to souls suffering in purgatory’. This ‘celestial confidence trick’, as William Manchester terms it, was an immediate success: peasants would starve their families and themselves to buy relief for dead relatives.4 Among those who took cynical advantage of this situation was Johann

By 1517, however, he could no longer hold himself in and on 31 October, the eve of All Saints’ Day, he made his move. In an action which would reverberate around the world, he nailed to the door of Wittenberg church ninety-five theses attacking the sale of indulgences, and daring any one at all to come forward and argue with him.14 ‘I, Martin Luther, Doctor, of the Order of Monks at Wittenberg, desire to testify publicly that certain propositions against pontifical indulgences, as they call them, have been put forth by me…’

The sack itself, which began on 6 May 1527, was truly terrible. Anyone who resisted the Teutons was murdered. Mansions and palaces that weren’t put to the torch were pillaged. The pope, the bulk of the cardinals in residence, and the Vatican bureaucracy, sought safety in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo, though one cardinal, with the gate already closed, had to be chair-lifted to safety in a basket. As for the rest of the population…‘Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomised, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than two thousand bodies were floating in the Tiber, nearly ten thousand others awaited burial and thousands more lay eviscerated in the streets, their remains half-eaten by rats and hungry dogs.’44 Some 4 million ducats changed hands in ransoms alone–those who had the wherewithal to pay were freed, the rest killed. Tombs were broken, the bones of saints tossed to the dogs, relics denuded of their jewels, archives and libraries torched, save for enough paper to provide bedding for horses, which were stabled in the Vatican.

In the 1540s the church introduced a list of books which it was prohibited to read or possess. To begin with, it was left to local authorities to search out the offending books, destroy them and punish their owners. Later, in 1559, Pope Paul IV issued the first list of forbidden books for the entire church, the Index Expurgatorius, which, the pope said, would threaten the souls of anyone reading them.50 All of the works of Erasmus were on the list (works that earlier popes had found a delight), as was the Qu’ran, as was Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, which would remain there until 1758, and Galileo’s Dialogue, proscribed until 1822. The Tridentine Index followed Paul’s list, in 1565. This banned almost three-quarters of the books printed in Europe. In 1571 a Congregation of the Index was established to control and update the list.

In Protestant Worms, in 1525, he found another printer, Peter Schöffer, who agreed to publish his work. Six thousand copies–a huge print run for the time–were freighted to England. But Tyndale was still a marked man and didn’t dare settle anywhere for a good few years. Only in 1529 did he judge it safe to make a home in Antwerp. It was a mistake. His presence came to the notice of the British and, at Henry’s personal insistence, he was jailed for more than a year in the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels. He was eventually tried for heresy, convicted and garrotted in public. To ensure he didn’t become a martyr, his remains were burned at the stake.

The Inquisition and the Index were both essentially negative responses by the Catholic church. This attitude was exemplified in the person of Paul III, who set up both fearsome instruments. Merely to possess a book on the Index was punishable in Spain by death for a long time.60 (The list was kept up to date until 1959, and was finally abolished by Pope Paul VI in 1966.)

As Bamber Gascoigne says, ‘Calvin was known as the pope of Geneva, but Pius certainly proved himself the Calvin of Rome.’ Another erstwhile Grand Inquisitor, he proposed to make adultery a capital offence and tried hard to remove the prostitutes from the city. He failed in both tasks but at best Pius V realised that negative measures were not enough and he was largely responsible for acting on the decisions of the Council of Trent, which had sat, on and off, from 1545 to 1560. Together with the Council of Nicaea, and Lateran IV, the Council of Trent was the most important council in the history of the church. To begin with, many Catholics hoped that the council would explore areas of compromise with the Protestants, but they were to be disappointed. The officers of the council dismissed Protestant theology completely and rejected any hope that the people might receive the bread and the wine in the mass or even hear the liturgy in their own language.

But the major battle, as expected, was fought over the concept of justification by faith alone. Luther’s revolutionary idea was that all a sinner had to do was to truly believe in Christ and he would be redeemed. The council reiterated that this was not nearly enough. The church’s argument was that, though damaged by the Fall, man retained the capacity to choose good over evil, but that he required Christ’s example, as interpreted by the church, so as to be, in effect, good by informed consent.66 The council also reaffirmed that there were seven sacraments–Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders, Matrimony–countermanding Luther’s claim that, in the Bible, there were just two, Baptism and Holy Communion.67 The number of sacraments was of course central to the structure of the church, for penance (confession) could only be heard by priests, who could only be appointed by bishops. And the council insisted that Purgatory, in reality a sixth-century ‘revelation’, really existed. In turn this helped maintain the doctrine of indulgences, though the council did outlaw any commerce in them.68 Thus the main thrust of the Council of Trent was to reassert Catholic doctrine in all its corrupt glory, making many issues even more black and white than they had been before. The intransigence at Trent laid down the basis for the terrible wars of religion of the seventeenth century.

The scientific revolution ‘outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.’ These are the words of Herbert Butterfield, the British historian, in his book The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, published in 1949.1

Instead of the words ‘tenth’, ‘hundredth’ and so on, he used ‘prime,’ ‘second’ etc. It wasn’t until 1617 that John Napier, referring to Stevin’s method, proposed a point or comma as the decimal separatrix.26 The decimal point became standard in Britain but the comma was (and is) widely used elsewhere.

In 1537, when he was still only twenty-three, he was placed in charge of anatomy teaching, and it was there, in the course of repeated dissections, that he began to see where Galen had gone wrong. This soon led him to reject Galen entirely and Vesalius began to teach only what he himself had uncovered. This proved enormously popular and students flocked to his lectures, five hundred at a time according to some accounts.51 After five years in Padua and while he was still barely twenty-eight, he produced The Structure of the Human Body, with a dedication to Charles V. Published in Basle, it contained many plates and woodcuts.

Harvey, we now know, had been lecturing on the circulation of the blood for a good twelve years before he committed himself to print. When his great classic, The Movement of the Heart and the Blood, appeared in 1628, Harvey was already fifty.

Then, in 1688, Leeuwenhoek trained his microscope on the transparent tail of the tadpole. ‘A sight presented itself more delightful than any mine eyes had ever beheld; for here I discovered more than fifty circulations of the blood in different places, while the animal lay quiet in the water, and I could bring it before my microscope to my wish. For I saw that not only in many places the blood was conveyed through exceedingly minute vessels, from the middle of the tail toward the edges, but that each of the vessels had a curve or turning, and carried the blood back toward the middle of the tail, in order to be again conveyed to the heart.’74 Nor should we overlook Leeuwenhoek’s discovery, in 1677, of spermatozoa, though it would be another century before their true role was identified. Leeuwenhoek was the first person to make biologists aware of the vast realms of microscopic life.

(This ‘Pentecost of reason’, Daniel Boorstin says, took place on the night of 10 November 1619.84) It was doubt that gave rise to Descartes’ famous saying ‘Cogito, ergo sum’–I am thinking, therefore I am.

Several of these were scientists and, as a result and for a while, science at Oxford blossomed. As part of this, a number of distinguished scientists began to meet in each other’s rooms to discuss their problems. This was a new practice that was occurring all over Europe. In Italy, for instance, in the early years of the seventeenth century, the Accademia dei Lincei (the Academy of the Lynx-Eyed) was formed, with Galileo as its sixth member. There was a similar group in Florence, and in Paris the Académie Royale des Sciences was founded formally in 1666, though men such as Descartes, Pascal and Pierre de Fermat had been meeting informally since about 1630.86

This enlarged group turned into the Royal Society, which was formally founded in 1662, though for some time the Fellows of the new society were still known as Gresham Philosophers.

Once described as ‘being bored with three quarters of what he knows’, in 1662 Petty published a Treatise on Taxes and Contributions which was one of the first works to show an awareness that value in an economy derives not from its store of treasure but from its capacity for production.

In the same year, with Petty’s help, John Graunt, another early FRS, published Observations on the Bills of Mortality of the City of London, which became the basis for life-insurance tables.