That well-rounded fellow, Renaissance Man, was not all he was cracked up to be, according to Jerry Brotton, author of The Renaissance Bazaar and lecturer in English at the University of London. In fact, the Renaissance had its shady side what with its commercialism, its political manoeuvring and its ruthless attitude to Jews, Muslims and Protestantism, writes Mary Russell
The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. By Jerry Brotton. Oxford University Press, 243 pp. £16.99 sterling
For anyone brought up to revere the rebirth of Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries - that's Western, Christian Europe we're talking about - this book will come as a liberating breath of fresh air.
All those aspects of the Renaissance which we cherish - the rise of humanism, the pursuit of science and the arts, the practice of rhetoric - progressed in tandem with the old tradition of non-questioning acceptance of authority, the subjugation of women, the persecution of non-Christians. A panel from a 15th-century illuminated manuscript, chosen by Brotton to illustrate his point about this duality, shows an inattentive group of boys being taught grammar while another panel shows a teacher spanking the bare buttocks of a recalcitrant pupil. "Rowdiness and strict discipline were common features of Renaissance education," he writes. Repetition, rote learning, diligent note-taking all formed part of the "new" humanist approach to learning and those teachers who promoted such methods endeared themselves to their patrons since their pupils were likely to turn out to be docile, passive and obedient subjects.
Learning and the art of rhetoric were considered unsuitable for women because "if a woman throws her arms around while speaking, or if she increases the volume of her speech with greater forcefulness, she will appear threateningly insane and require restraint". That's Renaissance Man, for you.
Still, it would be churlish not to celebrate the achievements of the day even if some of them put skilled craftsmen out of work. The invention of the printing press in the early 1450s enabled one company of printers to produce 12,000 books over five years where it had taken 45 scribes two years to copy 200 manuscripts. Silversmiths produced magnificent artifacts, using silver mined in Hispaniola by African slaves. Great painters sold their souls to the highest bidder.
Merchants commissioned paintings not for their love of art but in order that their household wealth - carved German woodwork, Turkish carpets, oranges from Spain - might be captured forever.
The borders of medical science were pushed back, due largely to the mediating scholarship of the 10th-century Arab, Ibn-Sina (Avicenna), whose study of Galen and Aristotle was translated and later printed in Italy so that Ibn-Sina's medical text became set reading in universities throughout Europe. In fact, without Arabic intervention, maritime exploration might have been delayed for it was due to Arabic scholars that Ptolemy's 2nd-century world map, contained in his Geography, was preserved and revised before a German printing press finally published it in 1482.
Trading practices (the Renaissance was all about wealth and its visible display, according to Brotton) owed a lot to the Arabs' method of accounting adopted by Fibonacci, who substituted Hindu-Arabic numerals for the more cumbersome Roman ones, thereby introducing us to the concept of the cipher - the Arabic word for zero.
Jerry Brotton is so clearly intent on setting the record straight about these moments in history that anyone accusing him of grinding his axe will forgive him since his writing is well-ordered, his research broad and his subject timely. History teachers please copy.
Mary Russell's Journeys of a Lifetime is published by Town House/Simon and Schuster