Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [23]
It is not surprising that Valla fell foul of the church, for his approach to all ancient documents was that nothing was sacred and all ought to be examined by the light of a powerful critical candle. He undertook a comparison between St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (Bible translation) and the Greek New Testament. This not only was important in itself and later had a major influence on Erasmus’s textual criticism but encouraged other scholars to do the same, over a whole range of texts. Thus in 1497 John Colet, who had been in Italy for the previous four years gathering information about how to examine ancient texts, gave a sensational and historic series of Oxford lectures on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He abandoned the scholastic approach altogether, and instead placed the Epistle, one of the most central of all Christian documents since it includes the theology of justification by faith, against its Roman historical background, using pagan authorities like Suetonius. This new historical approach was electrifying for clever young men. It was fresh, catchy, irreverent, iconoclastic and immensely appealing. It was one of those omnium gatherum revolutions in understanding (as was, later, Marx’s class analysis of history or Freud’s theory of the unconscious) that could be made to apply to all kinds of things and problems, with startling results.
What was developing, in short, was the first great cultural war in European history. One has a vivid glimpse of the future when, sometime between 1511 and 1513, Erasmus and John Colet together visited the famous shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury. This rivaled in wealth and fame the shrine of St. James in Compostela and was surrounded by rackets and fake marvels of all kinds. The two scholars were revolted by what they saw, especially the riches, which Colet said angrily should be given to the poor. He refused to bestow a reverential kiss on a prize relic, the “Arm of St. George,” dismissed a rag supposedly dipped in St. Thomas’s blood “with a whistle of contempt” and exploded when a licensed beggar showered him with holy water and offered him St. Thomas’s shoe to be kissed. He said to Erasmus, “Do these fools expect us to kiss the shoe of every good man who ever lived? Why not bring us their spittle or their dung to be kissed?” It was more than a hundred years since Chaucer’s pilgrims had come to Canterbury, “the holy blissful martyr for to seke,” full of unquestioned faith in his miracle-making capacities. In the meantime the Renaissance had been doing its work. Medieval certitude—or credulity, depending on one’s viewpoint—was now faced with Renaissance scrutiny or skepticism.
With the benefit of hindsight it seems strange that the church did not see what was coming and take steps to prepare for or even resist it. In German-speaking central Europe the cultural war was clearly stirring by the second half of the fifteenth century, with books pouring from the presses in ever-growing number and quantity. In the half century up to 1500, nearly 25,000 works were printed in Germany, and given the average edition size as 250, that means 6 million printed books were circulating in Germany alone. Most of the German humanists were men grown critical of the church. The archetypal one, Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), a poet awarded the laureate by the emperor Maximilian, attacked, among other things, the old-style teaching at Cologne University (he had attended no fewer than seven universities himself, including Bologna, where he learned Greek), the sale of indulgences, the useless life of monks, corruption in Rome and the trade in relics. Significantly, he brought out a new edition of Valla’s book on the Donation of Constantine. Hutten wrote a fluent new kind of German, witty, pithy and full of