Class 11 History Chapter 5 Changing Cultural Traditions Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. Who coined the term “Renaissance”, and in which book?

Answer: Jacob Burckhardt, in his book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860.

Q. What does the word “Renaissance” literally mean?

Answer: It literally means “rebirth”.

Q. Name the two Italian cities that NCERT calls the most vibrant of the period.

Answer: Venice and Genoa.

Q. What was a notary?

Answer: A notary combined the work of a solicitor with that of a record-keeper, and was needed to write and interpret trade agreements.

Q. From which Latin word does the term “humanities” come, and who used it to mean culture?

Answer: From the Latin word humanitas, used centuries earlier by the Roman lawyer and essayist Cicero (106-43 BCE).

Q. In which year, and in whose workshop, were 150 copies of the Bible printed?

Answer: In 1455, in the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1458), the German who built the first printing press.

Q. What do the words “celestial” and “terrestrial” mean?

Answer: Celestial means divine or heavenly; terrestrial means worldly.

Q. To whom did Copernicus hand over his manuscript De revolutionibus, and when?

Answer: To his follower Joachim Rheticus, on his deathbed.

Q. Why did the Italian cities need lawyers and notaries in large numbers?

Answer: Commerce was the chief activity of these cities, and large-scale trade was impossible without written agreements. Lawyers and notaries were needed to draft those agreements and to interpret them when they were disputed, which is why Padua and Bologna became centres of legal studies from the eleventh century.

Q. What role did Arab translators play in the growth of humanism in Europe?

Answer: Arab translators had preserved and translated the ancient Greek manuscripts, so when fourteenth-century European scholars began reading Plato and Aristotle, they read them through Arabic. In Arabic, Plato was Aflatun and Aristotle was Aristu. Greek scholars in turn translated Arabic and Persian works on natural science, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and chemistry for the rest of Europe.

Q. Give two ways in which the position of women in merchant families differed from that of women in aristocratic families.

Answer: First, a merchant’s wife often assisted in running the family shop and took charge of the business whenever her husband was away, while an aristocratic woman had no say in a business her own dowry had funded. Second, a merchant’s early death frequently pushed his widow into a larger public role than an aristocratic woman would ever have had, since the public role of aristocratic women was confined to being keepers of the household.

Q. What was the “Donation of Constantine”, and what did humanist scholars prove about it?

Answer: It was a document supposedly issued by Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, on which the clergy based their claim to judicial and fiscal powers. Humanist scholars proved that the document was forged and not genuine, which delighted princes who resented the Church’s interference in the affairs of the state.

Q. Why did Copernicus refuse to let De revolutionibus be printed during his lifetime?

Answer: Copernicus was a devout Christian, and he was afraid of the reaction of traditionalist clergymen to a theory that removed the earth from the centre of the universe. He therefore withheld the manuscript, handing it to his follower Joachim Rheticus only on his deathbed.

Q. What is meant by the Counter-Reformation? Give one example of it.

Answer: The Counter-Reformation was the Catholic Church’s own reform of itself from within, in response to the Protestant challenge. In Spain and Italy, churchmen began to emphasise a simple life and service to the poor. The clearest example is Ignatius Loyola’s Society of Jesus, founded in Spain in 1540 to combat Protestantism, whose members, the Jesuits, served the poor and widened knowledge of other cultures.

Q. What is meant by the expression “Renaissance Man”?

Answer: It describes a person with many interests and skills at once. The term arose because so many famous people of this age were scholar, diplomat, theologian and artist all combined in one, Leonardo da Vinci being the best-known example.

Q. How did the study of geometry and the use of oil change Renaissance painting?

Answer: A knowledge of geometry helped painters understand perspective, and by observing how light changes they gave their pictures a three-dimensional quality. The use of oil as a painting medium gave their colours a far greater richness than earlier media allowed.

Q. Why do historians today question the humanists’ label of a “dark age”?

Answer: With more research done on this period, recent historians are reluctant to describe any thousand-year stretch of Europe’s history as culturally dark. Scholars of the earlier centuries were already familiar with Greek and Roman culture, religion remained important throughout, and many elements associated with the Renaissance can be traced back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Q. Explain how the Italian cities revived after the fall of the western Roman Empire.

Answer: 1. The starting point. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, Italian towns that had once been political and cultural centres fell into ruin. There was no unified government, and the Pope, though sovereign in his own state, was a weak political figure across Italy.
2. What was happening around Italy. Western Europe was being reorganised through feudal bonds and unified under the Latin Church, eastern Europe lay under the Byzantine Empire, and further west Islam was creating a common civilisation. Italy itself was weak and fragmented, yet these very developments around it are what revived its culture.
3. Trade came first. The expansion of trade between the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic countries revived Italy’s coastal ports. From the twelfth century, the Mongols opened trade with China through the Silk Route, and trade with western Europe increased as well. Italian towns came to play the central role in this traffic.
4. A new political self-image. These towns stopped seeing themselves as part of a powerful empire and began thinking of themselves as independent city-states. Florence and Venice were republics, others were court-cities ruled by princes, and Venice and Genoa were the most vibrant of them all.
5. Why that mattered. In these cities the clergy were not politically dominant and there were no powerful feudal lords, so rich merchants and bankers governed actively. This helped the idea of citizenship take root, and even under military despots the townspeople’s pride in being citizens survived.

Q. How did the humanists divide the past into periods, and why do historians question that scheme today?

Answer: 1. The humanists’ belief. Humanists believed they were restoring “true civilisation” after centuries of darkness, because a dark age had set in, they thought, once the Roman Empire collapsed. Later scholars accepted this and assumed a new age had begun in Europe from the fourteenth century.
2. The scheme itself. The thousand years after the fall of Rome were called the Middle Ages or medieval period. Within it, the fifth to ninth centuries were the Dark Ages, the ninth to eleventh the Early Middle Ages and the eleventh to fourteenth the Late Middle Ages, while everything from the fifteenth century on was called modern.
3. The claim behind the label. The humanists argued that during the Middle Ages the Church had such complete control over people’s minds that all the learning of the Greeks and Romans had been blotted out.
4. Why the scheme is questioned. With more research, historians are reluctant to describe any period as culturally dark. Peter Burke argues that Burckhardt exaggerated the difference between this period and the one before it. Scholars of earlier centuries already knew Greek and Roman culture, religion stayed important throughout, and many elements associated with the Renaissance appear in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and even in ninth-century France.

Q. Describe the government of Venice as Cardinal Contarini presents it.

Answer: 1. The source. Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542) described his own city-state in The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, published in 1534.
2. Where authority lay. The whole authority of the city lay with a council, into which all the gentlemen of the city were admitted once they had passed the age of twenty-five.
3. Who was kept out, and why. The common people were deliberately excluded. Contarini’s reason is that many troubles and popular tumults arise in cities whose government is swayed by the common people.
4. The debate inside Venice. Some Venetians held the contrary opinion, that government should be defined by ability and by abundance of riches. Contarini answers that honest and liberally brought-up citizens often fall into poverty, so wealth is an unreliable test.
5. The settlement. The city’s “wise and prudent ancestors” therefore based membership on nobility of lineage, while making sure it was not confined to the most powerful few, so that every well-born or virtuously ennobled citizen could take part.

Q. How did the invention of printing change intellectual life in Europe?

Answer: 1. Where the technology came from. Europeans owed printing technology to the Chinese, and became familiar with it through traders and diplomats who visited the Mongol courts. Firearms, the compass and the abacus reached Europe by the same route.
2. The scale of the change. Earlier, texts existed as a small number of hand-written copies. In 1455, 150 copies of the Bible were printed in Gutenberg’s workshop, in the time a monk would have taken to write out a single copy.
3. What became available. By 1500 many classical texts, nearly all in Latin, had been printed in Italy. Books could now be bought, so students no longer depended solely on lecture notes.
4. How ideas moved. Ideas, opinions and information travelled more widely and more rapidly than ever before, and a printed book promoting new ideas could reach hundreds of readers quickly. Because individuals could buy copies for themselves, the habit of reading spread.
5. The historical consequence. The chief reason humanist culture spread rapidly across the Alps from the end of the fifteenth century is that printed books were circulating. This also explains why earlier intellectual movements had stayed confined to particular regions.

Q. Examine the position of women in Renaissance Italy, and the ways a few of them resisted it.

Answer: 1. The exclusion. The new ideal of individuality and citizenship excluded women. Men of aristocratic families dominated public life and made all the decisions within the family.
2. Education and marriage. Sons were educated to take their place in the family business or in public life, and younger sons were sometimes sent to join the Church. Marriages were often arranged to strengthen business alliances, dowries were invested in the family business but women had no say in how it was run, and a daughter for whom an adequate dowry could not be arranged was sent to a convent to live as a nun. Women were looked upon as keepers of the household.
3. The merchant exception. In merchant families wives often helped run the shop and managed the business when their husbands travelled, and a merchant’s early death could push his widow into a much larger public role.
4. The women who wrote. The Venetian Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558) wrote that although the study of letters promised women neither reward nor dignity, every woman ought to seek and embrace it. Known for her Greek and Latin, she was invited to give orations at the University of Padua, and was one of several Venetian women who criticised the republic for creating a highly limited definition of freedom that favoured the desires of men. Isabella d’Este (1474-1539), Marchesa of Mantua, ruled the state while her husband was absent, and the court of Mantua became famed for its intellectual brilliance.
5. What their writings show. Taken together, women’s writings reveal their conviction that they needed economic power, property and education to achieve an identity in a world dominated by men.

Q. How did the Renaissance idea of a human being differ from the older feudal idea?

Answer: 1. Religion loosens its hold. One feature of humanist culture was a slackening of religion’s control over human life. Italians were strongly attracted to material wealth, power and glory, though this did not make them irreligious.
2. Wealth and pleasure defended. Francesco Barbaro (1390-1454) of Venice wrote a pamphlet defending the acquisition of wealth as a virtue, and Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), in On Pleasure, criticised the Christian injunction against pleasure and argued that the study of history leads a person towards a life of perfection.
3. Manners and self-fashioning. There was a growing concern with good manners: how to speak politely, how to dress correctly, and what skills marked a person of culture.
4. The break with the three orders. Humanism implied that individuals could shape their own lives by means other than the pursuit of power and money, and rested on a belief that human nature was many-sided. That belief went directly against the feudal idea of three fixed orders of society.
5. Machiavelli’s darker version. In Chapter 15 of The Prince (1513), Machiavelli listed the contrasting qualities by which men are judged, generous or miserly, faithful or faithless, courteous or proud. He held that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature because human desires are insatiable, and named self-interest as the most powerful motive behind every human action.

Q. Trace the sequence in which Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton changed Europe’s picture of the universe.

Answer: 1. The belief they inherited. Christians believed the earth was a sinful place, that the burden of sin made it immobile, and that it stood at the centre of the universe with the celestial planets moving around it.
2. Copernicus (1473-1543). A contemporary of Martin Luther, he asserted that the planets, including the earth, rotate around the sun. Being a devout Christian who feared the traditionalist clergy, he withheld his manuscript De revolutionibus from the press and handed it to Joachim Rheticus on his deathbed.
3. Kepler (1571-1630). His Cosmographical Mystery popularised the sun-centred theory and demonstrated that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not in circles.
4. Galileo (1564-1642). He confirmed the notion of a dynamic world in his work The Motion, and remarked that the Bible, which lights the road to heaven, says little about how the heavens themselves work.
5. Newton. The revolution reached its climax with Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, his Principia Mathematica appearing in 1687.
6. What it took. It took over half a century for the difference between “heaven” and earth to be bridged, and the effect was to make knowledge, as distinct from belief, rest on observation and experiment.

Q. How did artists of this period achieve the quality called “realism”?

Answer: 1. Learning from the past. Artists were inspired by studying works of the past. The material remains of Roman culture were hunted for with as much excitement as ancient texts, and a thousand years after the fall of Rome fragments of art were still being discovered in its ruins. Admiration for the perfectly proportioned figures of the ancients made Italian sculptors want to continue that tradition, and in 1416 Donatello (1386-1466) broke new ground with lifelike statues.
2. Help from science. To be accurate about the human body, artists went to the laboratories of medical schools to study bone structure. Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), a Belgian professor of medicine at the University of Padua, was the first to dissect a human body, which marks the beginning of modern physiology.
3. The painters’ problem. Painters had no older models to copy, so they painted as realistically as they could. Geometry gave them perspective, careful observation of changing light gave their pictures a three-dimensional quality, and oil as a medium gave far richer colour.
4. Influences from outside Europe. The colours and designs of costumes in many paintings show the influence of Chinese and Persian art, which reached Italy through the Mongols.
5. The result. Anatomy, geometry, physics and a strong sense of beauty together produced the quality called realism, which European artists continued to use until the nineteenth century.

Q. Trace the debates within Christianity from the criticism of the Church to the Counter-Reformation.

Answer: 1. Humanism travels north. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, university scholars in northern Europe were drawn to humanist ideas. They studied classical Greek and Roman texts alongside the Christian holy books. The difference from Italy was in who led the movement: in Italy professional scholars dominated humanism, while in northern Europe it attracted many members of the Church.
2. What they demanded. They called on Christians to practise religion as laid down in the ancient texts, discarding rituals they regarded as later additions to a simple religion. Behind this lay a new view of human beings as free, rational agents, and of a distant God who created man and then left him free to pursue happiness here and now.
3. The grievances. Thomas More (1478-1535) in England and Erasmus (1466-1536) in Holland held that the Church had become a greedy institution extorting money from ordinary people. The clergy sold indulgences, documents that claimed to free the buyer from the burden of the sins he had committed. Once the Bible was printed and translated into local languages, ordinary Christians could see for themselves that their religion permitted nothing of the kind. Peasants across Europe rebelled against Church taxes, princes were irritated by the Church’s interference in state affairs, and humanist scholars proved that the “Donation of Constantine”, on which the clergy’s claim to judicial and fiscal powers rested, was a forgery.
4. Luther. In 1517 Martin Luther (1483-1546), a young German monk, launched a campaign against the Catholic Church, arguing that a person needed no priest to establish contact with God, and that complete faith in God alone guides a person to the right life and to heaven. This movement, the Protestant Reformation, led the churches of Germany and Switzerland to break their connection with the Pope. In Switzerland his ideas were popularised by Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and later by Jean Calvin (1509-64). Backed by merchants, the reformers appealed most in towns, while the Catholic Church kept its influence in rural areas.
5. The radicals. The Anabaptists in Germany went further, blending salvation with an end to every form of social oppression: since God had created all people equal, they argued, people need pay no taxes and could choose their own priests. This appealed to peasants oppressed under feudalism. Luther himself opposed such radicalism and called on German rulers to suppress the peasants’ rebellion, which was done in 1525. Radical ideas survived and merged with Protestant resistance in France, where Protestants claimed the right of the people to remove an oppressive ruler and choose one of their own liking. Eventually, in France as in much of Europe, the Catholic Church allowed Protestants to worship as they chose, and in England the rulers ended the connection with the Pope so that the king or queen became head of the Church.
6. The Catholic answer. The Catholic Church began to reform itself from within. In Spain and Italy churchmen emphasised a simple life and service to the poor, and in Spain Ignatius Loyola set up the Society of Jesus in 1540 to combat Protestantism. His followers, the Jesuits, took up the mission of serving the poor and widening knowledge of other cultures.

Q. “The cultural changes of this period were not the work of classical Greece and Rome alone.” Discuss this statement with reference to the chapter.

Answer: 1. What the classical revival did contribute. The archaeological and literary recovery of Roman culture created enormous admiration for that civilisation. Ruins were excavated, fragments of ancient art were found, the imperial Roman style was revived as “classical” architecture, and Petrarch’s close reading of Greek and Roman authors founded the humanist programme. None of this is in dispute.
2. The Arab and Islamic contribution. Fourteenth-century Europeans read Plato and Aristotle because Arab translators had preserved and translated the manuscripts, and the names Aflatun and Aristu record that route. Ptolemy’s Almagest still carries the Arabic article “al” in its title. Ibn Sina of Bukhara, al-Razi and Ibn Rushd of Spain were regarded as wise men in the Italian world, and Ibn Rushd’s method of reconciling philosophical knowledge with religious belief was adopted by Christian thinkers.
3. The Chinese and Mongol contribution. Printing technology came from the Chinese, and Europeans became familiar with it through traders and diplomats at the Mongol courts. Firearms, the compass and the abacus reached Europe the same way. The colours and designs of costumes in many Italian paintings show the influence of Chinese and Persian art, again transmitted through the Mongols.
4. Asia was ahead. The chapter states that technology and skills in Asia had moved far ahead of anything the Greeks and Romans had known. Much more of the world had become connected, and new techniques of navigation let people sail far further than before.
5. The links that carried it. The expansion of Islam and the Mongol conquests linked Asia and North Africa with Europe, not politically but through trade and the learning of skills. Europeans learned from India, Arabia, Iran, Central Asia and China as well as from the Greeks and Romans.
6. Why this was forgotten. These debts went unacknowledged for a long time because, when the history of this period first came to be written, historians saw it from a Europe-centred viewpoint. Recognising the debts is part of the same rethinking in which Peter Burke argues that Burckhardt exaggerated the sharpness of the break with the past.

Q. Explain how humanism grew in the Italian towns, and how it changed education and the arts.

Answer: 1. Why it began in the towns. Europe’s earliest universities were in Italian towns, and Padua and Bologna had been centres of legal studies from the eleventh century because commerce, the chief activity of these cities, needed lawyers and notaries for its trade agreements.
2. The shift Petrarch made. Law remained popular, but it began to be studied through the lens of earlier Roman culture. Francesco Petrarch (1304-78) treated antiquity as a distinctive civilisation and insisted it could be understood properly only through the actual words of ancient Greek and Roman writers, so he stressed the close reading of ancient authors.
3. What “humanism” came to mean. This educational programme implied there was much to learn that religious teaching alone could not give, and nineteenth-century historians labelled it humanism. By the early fifteenth century a humanist meant a master teaching grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. The Latin humanitas, root of “humanities”, had been used by Cicero (106-43 BCE) to mean culture. These subjects were not drawn from religion, and they emphasised the skills developed through discussion and debate, which is exactly what Giovanni Pico della Mirandola argued in On the Dignity of Man (1486).
4. Florence. The new ideas attracted attention at many universities, above all at the newly established university in Petrarch’s home town of Florence. Until the end of the thirteenth century Florence had made little mark in trade or learning; in the fifteenth century that changed dramatically, and the city became known through Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giotto (1267-1337), whose portraits were lifelike where earlier figures had been stiff. The phrase “Renaissance Man” comes from this world, where one person could be scholar, diplomat, theologian and artist at once.
5. Into the schools, and beyond formal education. Humanist subjects slowly entered schools, in Italy and across Europe, though law, medicine and theology continued to dominate university curricula. Formal education was in any case not the only channel: art, architecture and books carried humanist ideas just as effectively.
6. The result in the arts. Sculptors followed the perfectly proportioned figures of antiquity, Donatello broke new ground in 1416, painters used geometry for perspective and oil for richer colour, and anatomy, geometry, physics and a sense of beauty together produced realism. In architecture, excavation of Rome’s ruins revived the imperial Roman style as “classical” architecture, and Michelangelo and Brunelleschi worked in it. One further change belongs here: artists were now known by their own names, as individuals, and no longer merely as members of a guild.

Q. Describe the Scientific Revolution and the changes it brought to the way Europeans understood knowledge, God and the individual.

Answer: 1. A challenge from a new direction. The Christian idea of man as a sinner had been questioned by the humanists; the scientists questioned it from an entirely different direction. The old belief was that the earth was sinful, that the burden of sin made it immobile, and that it lay at the centre of the universe with the celestial planets moving around it.
2. The turning point. Copernicus (1473-1543), a contemporary of Martin Luther, asserted that the planets, the earth among them, rotate around the sun. Fearing the traditionalist clergy, he kept De revolutionibus from the press and gave it to Joachim Rheticus on his deathbed.
3. Confirmation. Over half a century later the gap between heaven and earth was bridged by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), whose Cosmographical Mystery showed the planets moving in ellipses rather than circles, and by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who confirmed a dynamic world in The Motion. The revolution reached its climax with Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation.
4. A new basis for knowledge. Galileo remarked that the Bible, which lights the road to heaven, says little about how the heavens work. Knowledge, as distinct from belief, came to rest on observation and experiment, and once scientists had shown the way, work in what we now call physics, chemistry and biology expanded rapidly. Historians call this the Scientific Revolution.
5. The effect on belief. In the minds of sceptics and non-believers, God began to be replaced by Nature as the source of creation. Even believers began to speak of a distant God who does not directly regulate life in the material world.
6. Science in public, and the individual. Scientific societies created a new scientific culture in the public domain: the Paris Academy, established in 1670, and the Royal Society of London, formed in 1662 for the promotion of natural knowledge, held lectures and conducted experiments. Alongside this ran the deeper change of the period. The public sphere of government and formal religion separated from the private sphere of family and personal religion; the individual had a role in each and was no longer merely a member of one of the three orders. An artist was known for himself. In the eighteenth century this sense of the individual would take political form, in the belief that all individuals had equal political rights, while Europe itself, once united by the Roman Empire and later by Latin and Christianity, dissolved into states each held together by a common language.