The Renaissance
The European Renaissance as Appropriation and Creation
The European Renaissance is often remembered for its visual artists’ legacy, such as da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or for Shakespeare and Cervantes’ literature. Nevertheless, many ideas that
formed the basis of the seventeenth century's scientific revolution were formalized during the
Renaissance period. To attempt explaining those ideas’, authors cite a multitude of individual
heroes and historical contexts. While those Renaissance "heroic" humanists owe their
inspiration, to a certain extent, to Ancient ideas and foreign devices, these humanists still stand
out for transforming and expanding those ancient ideas, and for giving new uses to those
As any historic period, it is challenging to limit the Renaissance within a precise
chronology, as it overlaps with the previous and next historic periods (late Middle Ages and the
Enlightenment, respectively). John Gribbin marks the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453
as the start of the Renaissance (xx). According to Gribbin, the invasion pushed scholars who
could read Greek out of Constantinople and towards West Europe (xx). The author states that
some historians consider Renaissance has still not ended. Despite that, Gribbin uses Isaac
Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, as the
Renaissance’s final marker (xxi).
Many of those scholars escaping the invaded Constantinople ended up in Italy,
considered the Renaissance’s place of birth (Kehoe, Damerow, and Duvall). The word
Renaissance itself means “rebirth”. This can be interpreted as the rebirth of the Europeans from
the Black plague, which killed more than a third of them. The most important interpretation of
Renaissance, however, is the period of repositioning men at the center of the universe (Kehoe,
Damerow, and Duvall). This humanist movement was inspired by Ancient Greek and Roman
culture and scholarship (Kehoe, Damerow, and Duvall) — much of that translated from the
Greek and commented by Islamic scholars, physicians, and astronomers (Fara 57).
The Islamic translations of Hellenistic works started long before the Renaissance’s
beginning. In the eighth century’s Baghdad, caliphs established the first center of higher
learning, funded by the state and private parties (Fara 58). In the tenth century, Arabic centers of
learning had extensive collections of Greek works translated to Arabic, within the fields of
medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and natural history, among others. Islamic
physician/astronomers also built astronomical observatories and teaching hospitals, institutions
that would be copied across Renaissance’s Europe (Fara 58). Before the twelfth century, Western
Europe was absorbing those Islamic works on Archimedes, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Galen, and
comments on Aristotle, translated to Latin. After the twelfth century, James E. McClellan III and
Harold Dorn affirm that “western tradition finally made it to Western Europe”(185).
The Islamic civilization also helped shape the Renaissance through its philosophers, some
becoming very influential during the period. Two of the most famous Islamic Aristotelians were
Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd (Averroes) and the polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Some
excerpts translated to Latin from Avicenna’s The Book of Healing, a poetic encyclopedia of
everything an educated man should know, became textbooks — commonly studied by European
university scholars during the Renaissance, who had Avicenna in high regard as a physician
Avicenna epitomized some of the characteristics many Renaissance scholars wished to
achieve: getting closer to God through knowledge of the universe and both its Pythagorean
musicality and Aristotelian order (Fara 57). For that reason, beyond his medical practice, he
researched optics, astronomy, and music. This was a combination recognizable to Renaissance
university students: astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music formed the quadrivium. As
expected, this curriculum was greatly influenced by the Arabic translations from Ancient Greece
One ancient Greek book that reached humanist astronomers from Arabic translations was
Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest. This book was later expanded and commented by the humanist
Regiomantus in his book Epitome (Gribbin 7). Regiomantus' version of the Almagest inspired
Nicolaus Copernicus, then a young physician and canon for the Formwork Cathedral in Poland,
to develop his own astronomic model.
While carrying out his duties, Copernicus designed his astronomical mathematical ideas,
which would transform the ancient Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe into a
Renaissance's Heliocentric model. Both models had the moon circling the Earth, but Copernicus’
one brought the new idea of planets moving around the sun — the opposite of Ptolemy’s model
and against the established belief of his contemporaries (Gribbin 7).
Despite what is nowadays a popular belief — that Copernicus suffered strong opposition
from the Catholic church — the scholar himself presented his model to the Pope Clement VII
and some cardinals, with no great reactions (Gribbin 9). Asked by a cardinal, he published De
Revolutionizes Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres) in 1543. It is
important to stress: Copernicus’ intention was to expand ancient knowledge, rather than to
overturn it — he was more an Aristotelian philosopher than a scientist, and did no look forward
proving experimentally his ideal model of the universe (Gribbin 19).
The ban imposed upon Copernicus’ work by the Catholic Church came only come later.
The priest Giordano Bruno promoted Copernicus' heliocentric model because it matched Bruno's
arcane religious beliefs. He ended up being executed by the Inquisition for heresy (Gribbin 18);
the church disallowed the Copernican model only after Bruno got involved with it — which also
made Galileo Galilei’s future dealings with the church more difficult and dangerous (Gribbin
Ancient medical writings, having come from Islamic Scholars as well, were studied
deeply and updated by Renaissance medical practitioners. Such is the example of the eighty-
three surviving Galen’s writings about anatomy and physiology. They were basic textbooks for
Renaissance medical students, but they had many limitations — such as the fact that Galen
carried out dissection of mostly exclusively animals to describe the human body.
A bold physician called Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish anatomist who studied at the
University of Padua (Italy), identified the fails, correcting some of them and expanding Galen’s
work (Gribbin 21). Dissecting human bodies of convicted criminals and inspired by Galen’s
philosophy of looking for his own answers, Vesalius “revised important errors that had been
passed down through the centuries by men who pledged their faith in books rather than trusting
the evidence revealed by their own scalpels” (Fara 119). Before Vesalius, surgery was
considered an inferior medical practice, and professors would never touch the dissected body
(the dissection was carried out by a surgeon). Vesalius innovation was to create a culture of
hands-on work among medical practitioners, elevating surgery to a respected activity. To do this,
he used ancient knowledge, gathered from translated Islamic sources, ultimately revised and
transformed in his masterwork De Humani Fabrica, published in 1543 (Gribbin 25).
Regarding technology in the Renaissance, Johannes Gutenberg created probably one of
the most important inventions of the period: the printing with movable types. The printing
presses spread across Europe and promoted the distribution of information and knowledge not
only among the rank of the initiated — scholars — but to anyone interested, who could read and
afford books, as well (McClellan III and Dorn 204).
Except… that Gutenberg neither invent the movable types in Renaissance, nor
gunpowder was invented in the same period by Europeans, much less the magnetic compass
(Fara 49). Joseph Needham, an important Sinologist of the twentieth century, in the voice of
Patricia Fara, explains that the Silk Road “not only enabled exotic goods to travel westwards, but
also encouraged the migration of technological and agricultural products”(49).
What Renaissance Europeans did is to use those equipment in a different manner than
they had been used in China. For instance, rotating magnetic devices were utilized since the first
century CE by the Chinese to help position tombs and houses. They also were used by Chinese
maritime artisans, but nowhere near to the extent of which European traders used compasses
(Fara 50). That was the same technology that oriented the great Portuguese and Spanish
navigations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
With respect to their printing movable types, the Chinese used them mostly to print books
that stored information, instead of aiming at changing an established societal organization.
Europeans, on the other hand, used books to reshape reality. Moreover, powder is another
example: although the Chinese had cannons much earlier than the Europeans, those weapons
impacted European society in a much deeper way (Fara 49).
The Renaissance in Europe was a period of great accomplishments in the arts, science,
and technology. Many of the theories developed during that time impacted the scientific
revolution of the seventeenth century, such as the Copernican heliocentric universe — the basis
upon which Galileo would build his own theory. Much of what Renaissance humanists created is
owed, in part, to ancient knowledge preserved and developed by Islamic scholars during the
Islamic empire; or to devices brought by international trade to Europe, such as the compass from
China. Notwithstanding that, Renaissance men still deserve praise for their ingenuity in
absorbing, adapting, applying, and expanding that ancient knowledge, and for the empowering
use of those foreign devices.
