Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy, Ph.D. for Scholars Online
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Chapter 14: The Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution
31. Thu, Dec 19, 2013
Today we'll try to tackle the Scientific Revolution and the changes in daily life that emerged throughout the early modern period in Europe.
The daily life pieces of the textbook are a mixture of the genuinely informative and the silly. For example: "Those who were fortunate had a bed; others slept on sacks filled with straw." Which is fine...except, what would you call a sack filled with straw on which to sleep? I'd call it a bed. They don't go into any detail about what the other, better kind of bed consisted of: we can be assured, though, that it was not a memory-foam mattress on a set of box springs.
As a more extensive example, take the following paragraph:
Few ordinary villagers could read. Often even the village priest could not read. Nevertheless, soon after the invention of movable type, publishers started selling popular works. Single printed sheets known as broadsides began to appear. A broadside might include a royal decree or news of some sensational crime or other events. Books and boradsides arrived in the village, carried by peddlers who brought goods from the outside world. When the villagers gathered together, they might enjoy listening to someone read the latest broadside.
This is strange in several ways. First of all, arguably the appearance of broadsides in and of itself probably attests a significant rise in the reading level of the ordinary population. (One can speculate on why this came about: one reason is certainly the availability of reading material in a cheaper format after the invention of printing with movable type; another reason would be the emphasis in Protestant regions on the ability and responsibility of the individual to read scripture for himself. It is worth noting that at the latter end of this period, the Puritans who emigrated from England to the New World and set up Massachusetts Bay Colony had a literacy rate approaching 100%.) In any case, rather than reaching this fairly reasonable conclusion, the authors of the textbook suggest that most people still couldn't read, but that they would gather to hear some learned person reading broadsides. This is not theoretically impossible, but it doesn't seem likely: it seems much more probably that if the avenue of transmission of such information had generally been a single reader, then such documents would have been distributed to the single readers, rather than posted publicly. We do know that by Shakespeare's time there were schools available for more or less middle-stratum villagers in England, and something similar was in place in most other parts of Europe.
In general, be wary of historical writers when they start going off on a tangent about what might have happened in any given case. Anything might have happened. We're here to talk about what did happen. The question of why something happens always (and reasonably) suggests the possibility that something else might have happened instead, but it needs to be kept within responsible bounds, not mere speculation for the sake of speculation.
"Demons and spirits no longer dominated views of daily life." Really? Why is it, then, that this period — not the Middle Ages — was the heyday of witch hunts (as was mentioned earlier in the same chapter). James I of England was particularly concerned with witches; it was the enlightened colony of Massachusetts that engaged in witch trials in the American colonies.
The textbook also offers some truly priceless plums: "Wealthy people still lived better than most of the peasants and the urban poor, who for the most part ate the same simple meals they had eaten for centuries." My first response to this is, "Well, duh..." When in the long history of mankind have the wealthy not lived better than the poor? That's kind of what being wealthy is about, isn't it? Second, however, it does seem to equate "living" with "eating"; arguably there are more components to life than meals.
The textbook implicitly depicts thatched-roof cottages as primitive and minimalistic. In fact one can still find thatched buildings today; in a relatively damp climate, thatch doesn't make such a bad roofing material. Thatchers were skilled tradesmen who knew their job, and the roofs work better than many other things.
The generalizations about the Scientific Revolution are broad and glib — they don't take into account, for example, of the fact that many of the most important discoveries of the age were in astronomy — an area almost definitionally not susceptible to the experimental method. Question general assumptions when they're stated broadly. They're often oversimplifications that don't bear real scrutiny.
The textbook caption explains that "The Italian astronomer Galileo was called before the Inquisition and forced to deny his observations." In fact, the Inquisition was much more concerned with Galileo's conclusions than his observations: and some of those conclusions were patently false. A few things that he could have observed but did not (such as the frequency of tides) he got completely wrong: any illiterate fisherman knew better than he did about that. All this led some people to suspect, not unreasonably, that his real or fanciful observations were not a very good basis for discarding everything they knew or thought they knew about how the world worked. As so often, the reality is far more complex than the nickel summary would have you believe.
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