Class 11 History Chapter 5 Changing Cultural Traditions NCERT Solutions in English

Q. Which elements of Greek and Roman culture were revived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries?

Answer: A great deal was recovered in these two centuries, and it came back through three separate routes: through texts, through the material remains of Rome, and through Arab translations.

1. The close reading of ancient authors. Francesco Petrarch (1304-78) treated antiquity, the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as a distinctive civilisation which could be understood properly only through the actual words of ancient Greek and Roman writers. This is why the study of law itself began to be pursued through the lens of earlier Roman culture, and why the careful reading of ancient texts became the centre of the new education.

2. The humanist subjects. Grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, all of them subjects of the classical world, came back as the syllabus of the humanist master by the early fifteenth century. Even the name was revived: the Latin humanitas, the root of “humanities”, had been used centuries earlier by the Roman lawyer and essayist Cicero (106-43 BCE) to mean culture.

3. Greek philosophy. In the fourteenth century many scholars began reading translated works of Plato and Aristotle. Monks and clergymen had known these writings through the Middle Ages, but had never made them widely known. The credit for their survival belongs to Arab translators, who had preserved and translated the manuscripts, and their Arabic names, Aflatun for Plato and Aristu for Aristotle, record that route. Ptolemy’s Almagest, a work on astronomy written in Greek before 140 CE, still carries the Arabic definite article “al” in its title for the same reason.

4. Sculpture and the ancient sense of proportion. The material remains of Roman culture were sought with as much excitement as the 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 men and women sculpted so many centuries earlier made Italian sculptors want to continue that tradition, and in 1416 Donatello (1386-1466) broke new ground with lifelike statues.

5. Imperial Roman architecture. Rome revived spectacularly in the fifteenth century. From 1417 the popes were politically stronger, and they encouraged the study of the city’s history, while archaeologists, practising a brand new skill, carefully excavated its ruins. What this inspired was called a “new” style, but it was in fact a revival of the imperial Roman style, and is described today as “classical” architecture. Sixteenth-century Italian architecture copied many features straight from imperial Roman buildings.

6. Ideas of the citizen and the city-state. Italian towns stopped thinking of themselves as part of a powerful empire and began to see themselves as independent city-states, in which rich merchants and bankers actively governed. The pride of being a citizen, a classical idea, took root so firmly that it did not weaken even when a city fell for a time under military despots.

A caution worth adding. The chapter itself warns against overstating this revival. Scholars of earlier centuries were already familiar with Greek and Roman cultures, so this was a renewal of interest and a change of emphasis, not a rebirth out of nothing.

Q. Compare details of Italian architecture of this period with Islamic architecture.

Answer: The Italian side of this comparison comes from this chapter. The Islamic side is not described in this theme, so it has to be drawn from what is well established about the mosques, tombs and palaces built across the Islamic lands in the same centuries. Take the comparison point by point.

The one line that holds it together. Both traditions loved the dome, the arch and rich surface decoration, and both were paid for by rulers and by the very rich. They part company over the human figure: Italian architecture of this period put man at the centre of the wall and the ceiling, which is exactly what its humanist culture would lead you to expect, while Islamic architecture put the written word and geometry there instead.

Q. Why were Italian towns the first to experience the ideas of humanism?

Answer: Five conditions came together in Italy that existed nowhere else in Europe at the time.

1. Italy was full of towns, and the towns were rich. Trade between the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic countries revived Italy’s coastal ports, and from the twelfth century the Mongols opened trade with China through the Silk Route, so trade with western Europe grew as well. Italian towns played the central role in all of it. Wealth on this scale is what paid for scholars, artists and libraries.

2. There was no strong central power to control thought. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, Italy had no unified government, and the Pope, though sovereign in his own state, was a weak political figure across the peninsula. Elsewhere in Europe, western lands were being organised through feudal bonds and unified under the Latin Church, and eastern Europe lay under the Byzantine Empire. Italy’s very weakness and fragmentation left space for new ideas.

3. The towns governed themselves. Italian towns thought of themselves as independent city-states. Florence and Venice were republics, and in Venice and Genoa the clergy were not politically dominant and there were no powerful feudal lords, so rich merchants and bankers governed actively. A society that debated who should sit in its own council was already asking humanist questions about man and his capacities.

4. The universities were already there, and already secular in their business. Europe’s earliest universities had been set up in Italian towns. Padua and Bologna were centres of legal studies from the eleventh century, because commerce needed lawyers and notaries to write and interpret trade agreements. When Petrarch shifted the study of law towards the culture of ancient Rome, there was an existing academic world ready to take the change. The new ideas then attracted attention at many universities, above all at the newly established one in Petrarch’s home town of Florence.

5. The remains of antiquity were physically present. Italy was where the ruins of ancient Rome actually stood. Fragments of ancient art were still being dug out of them a thousand years after Rome’s fall, and popes from 1417 encouraged that excavation. No other part of Europe could study antiquity by walking out into its own streets.

And what carried it further. Once printed books began circulating from the end of the fifteenth century, the humanist culture of Italy spread rapidly across the Alps. That is the chapter’s explanation both for the speed of the spread and for why earlier intellectual movements had stayed confined to particular regions.

Q. Compare the Venetian idea of good government with those in contemporary France.

Answer: Venice is described in this chapter by Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542) in The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1534). France of the same centuries is the France of Theme 4, moving towards the absolute monarchy of the new monarchs. The two ideas of good government are almost opposites.

The comparison in one line. Venice located good government in a council of citizens and feared the concentration of power in one man; France located it in the king and feared the assembly. That is why the ideal citizen of Venice is a well-born man taking his seat in the council at twenty-five, while the ideal subject of France is a loyal officeholder at court.

What they shared. Neither was a democracy in our sense. In both, ordinary working people and all women were outside political life altogether, and in both, birth was the main gate through which a person entered the governing class.

Q. What were the features of humanist thought?

Answer: Humanism is the name nineteenth-century historians gave to the culture that grew out of a new educational programme in the Italian towns. Its features can be set out under seven heads.

1. Antiquity studied directly, in its own words. Petrarch held that antiquity was a distinctive civilisation and that it could be understood properly only through the actual words of ancient Greeks and Romans. Close reading of ancient authors, rather than summaries or commentaries, was therefore the method.

2. A body of learning outside religion. The programme implied that there was much worth learning which religious teaching alone could not give. By the early fifteenth century a “humanist” meant a master who taught grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. These subjects were not drawn from religion, and the word itself goes back to the Latin humanitas, used by Cicero to mean culture.

3. Skill built through discussion and debate. Humanist subjects emphasised the skills a person develops by arguing a case. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola put it exactly in On the Dignity of Man (1486): for Plato and Aristotle nothing served the search for truth better than attending the exercise of debate as often as possible, because just as bodily energy is strengthened by gymnastic exercise, so in this wrestling-place of letters the energy of the mind becomes far stronger.

4. Man as an individual capable of shaping his own life. This is the belief Burckhardt built his account on: that man as an individual was capable of making his own decisions and developing his skills. Humanism implied that individuals could shape their lives through means other than the pursuit of power and money, and that human nature was many-sided, which cut directly against the feudal idea of three fixed orders.

5. A slackening of religion’s control over life. Italians were strongly attracted to material wealth, power and glory, though they were not necessarily irreligious. Francesco Barbaro (1390-1454) of Venice defended the acquisition of wealth as a virtue, and Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), in On Pleasure, criticised the Christian injunction against pleasure and held that the study of history leads a person towards a life of perfection.

6. Good manners and the cultivated person. There was a growing concern with how to speak politely, how to dress correctly and what skills marked a person of culture. Out of the same world comes the phrase “Renaissance Man”, for someone who was scholar, diplomat, theologian and artist at once.

7. It shaped art and architecture, not just the classroom. Formal education was not the only means by which humanists changed how people thought. Art, architecture and books did the same work, which is why the humanist idea of man appears in the realism of Renaissance painting and sculpture and in the classical style of its buildings.

Two limits to state. First, the new ideal of individuality and citizenship excluded women, a point the chapter makes plainly and Cassandra Fedele’s writing confirms. Second, humanist culture was admired and imitated by the educated and the wealthy, but very few of its ideas reached ordinary people, most of whom could not read or write. In northern Europe humanism took a further turn, attracting many members of the Church itself and leading to a call to practise religion as laid down in the ancient texts.

Q. Write a careful account of how the world appeared different to seventeenth-century Europeans.

Answer: Compare a European of 1300 with one of 1650 and almost every large picture in his head had changed: the shape of the universe, the source of knowledge, the place of religion, the size of the known world, the value of the individual, and the country he thought he belonged to.

1. The universe had changed shape. Christians had believed the earth was a sinful place, 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. Copernicus (1473-1543) asserted that the planets, the earth among them, rotate around the sun. Over the next half-century Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) showed in his Cosmographical Mystery that the planets move in ellipses rather than circles, and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) confirmed the notion of a dynamic world in The Motion. The revolution reached its climax with Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation. By the end of the seventeenth century the earth was one moving body among others, and no longer the fixed floor of creation.

2. Knowledge now came from observation, not from authority. Galileo remarked that the Bible, which lights the road to heaven, says little about how the heavens themselves work. Knowledge, as distinct from belief, came to be based 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. It had a public face too: 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, so a scientific culture existed in the open where anyone could see it.

3. God had moved further away. In the minds of sceptics and non-believers, God began to be replaced by Nature as the source of creation. Even those who kept their faith began to speak of a distant God who does not directly regulate life in the material world. Religion had also become a matter each individual chose, rather than something the Church simply prescribed, and after the Reformation a European could be Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist or Anglican, with the ruler of England as head of the Church there and the Catholic Church in France eventually allowing Protestants to worship as they chose.

4. The world itself was larger, and Europe was not its centre. New geographical knowledge overturned the old belief that the Mediterranean Sea lay at the centre of the world. Columbus reached America in 1492, Portuguese mathematicians had calculated latitude by observing the sun in 1484, Mercator prepared a cylindrical map of the earth in 1569, and new techniques of navigation let people sail much further than had been possible earlier. Much more of the world had become connected, and Europeans had learned not only from the Greeks and Romans but from India, Arabia, Iran, Central Asia and China.

5. Books had made ideas ordinary. Where texts had once existed as a few hand-written copies, 150 copies of the Bible were printed in Gutenberg’s workshop in 1455, and by 1500 many classical texts had been printed in Italy. Students no longer depended solely on lecture notes, a printed book could reach hundreds of readers quickly, and individuals could buy copies for themselves, which developed the habit of reading. A seventeenth-century European could own the arguments that a fourteenth-century one could only have heard about.

6. The individual had become visible. The “public” sphere of government and formal religion had gradually separated from the “private” sphere of family and personal religion, and a person had a role in each. He was no longer simply a member of one of the three orders; he was also a person in his own right. An artist was no longer just a member of a guild but 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.

7. Europe was becoming a set of nations. The different regions of Europe had begun to develop separate identities based on language. A continent once united in part by the Roman Empire, and later by Latin and by Christianity, was dissolving into states, each held together by a common language of its own.

The account in one line. To a European of the seventeenth century the world was larger, older, more mobile and more knowable than it had been to his ancestors, the sky above him was in motion, the truth was something he could test rather than something he had to accept, and he himself was a person with a name rather than a member of an order.