Renaissance humanism in Northern Europe

Renaissance humanism came much later to Germany and Northern Europe in general than to Italy, and when it did, it encountered some resistance from the scholastic theology which reigned at the universities.

Its flourishing period began at the close of the 15th century and lasted only until about 1520, when it was absorbed by the more popular and powerful religious movement, the Reformation, as Italian humanism was superseded by the papal counter-Reformation.

Greek and Hebrew were studied, not with the purpose of ministering to a cult of antiquity, but to reach the fountains of the Christian system more adequately.

Cranach lived in Wittenberg after 1504 and painted portraits of Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon and other leaders of the German Reformation.

By his residence at the court of Frederick III and at Basel, as one of the secretaries of the council, he became a well-known character north of the Alps long before he was chosen pope.

The fame of the Renaissance was carried over the pathways of trade which led from Northern Italy to Augsburg, Nuremberg, Konstanz and other German cities.

The visits of Frederick III and the campaigns of Charles VIII and the ascent of the throne of Naples by the princes of Aragon carried Germans, Frenchmen and Spaniards to the greater centres of the peninsula.

As the fame of Italian culture spread, scholars and artists began to travel to Venice, Florence and Rome, and caught the inspiration of the new era.

[2] However, he found that the German princes and nobles cared more for horses and dogs than for poets and scholars and loved their wine-cellars better than the muses.

However, he also contended that many Italians were jealous of German science and technology, which he considered superior taking the examples of the printing press and the work of the astronomer Regiomontanus.

During the last half of the 15th century, there were quickly added to this list universities at Greifswald and Freiburg 1457, Trier 1457, Basel 1459, Ingolstadt 1472, Tübingen and Mainz 1477, and Wittenberg 1502.

Most of these universities had the four faculties, although the popes were slow to give their assent to the sanction of the theological department, as in the case of Vienna and Rostock, where the charter of the secular prince authorized their establishment.

In the Netherlands, universities or "Latin schools" spurred on by Renaissance humanists helped the majority of people in the region become more literate than in most other European kingdoms.

In clashing with the scholastic method and curricula, the new teaching met with many a repulse, and in no case was it thoroughly triumphant till the era of the Reformation opened.

In 1466, it received Peter Luder of Kislau, who had visited Greece and Asia Minor, and had been previously appointed to a chair in Heidelberg, 1456.

Sebastian Brant taught there at the close of the century and among its notable students were Reuchlin and the Reformers, Leo Jud and Zwingli.

The last German university of the Middle Ages, Wittenberg, founded by Frederick the Wise and placed under the patronage of the Virgin Mary and St. Augustine, acquired a worldwide influence through its professors, Luther and Melanchthon.

At the close of the 15th century, Nuremberg, the fountain of inventions, had four Latin schools and was the home of Albrecht Dürer the painter and his friend Willibald Pirkheimer, a patron of learning.

One Christmas the clergy of the place entertained the pupils, giving them each cloth for a new coat and a piece of money as begun with the 4th class.

He was inclined to be severe on clerical abuses but, at the close of his career, wanted to substitute for the study of Virgil and Horace, Sedulius and Prudentius.

Mutianus Rufus, in his correspondence, went so far as to declare that Christianity is as old as the world and that Jupiter, Apollo, Ceres and Christ are only different names of the one hidden God.

A name which deserves a high place in the German literature of the last years of the Middle Ages is John Trithemius, 1462–1516, abbot of a Benedictine convent at Sponheim, which, under his guidance, gained the reputation of a learned academy.