THE MIDDLE AGES ARE THE LITERAL BRINGING OF LIGHT...:

We still use the word "medieval" as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something "medieval" is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-informed or incompetent, and so on. And by contrast, "renaissance" is usually a sunnier word. It evokes exuberance and creativity, intellectual freshness. A "renaissance man" (and it usually is a man) is someone endowed with an almost superhuman galaxy of qualities and skills.

As many scholars have pointed out, this odd bit of chronological snobbery is largely a 19th-century creation, from the days when the Renaissance was seen as the precursor of the Age of Reason, the moment somewhere around the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century which saw the beginnings of Western civilisation's liberation from dogma and bigotry. It is not news for historians that the story is more complex than this - or that it was also a period (particularly in Italy) of ceaseless and destructive warfare. [...]

If we demythologise the Renaissance a little, we may learn to do more justice to what preceded it. Professor Fletcher has a brief discussion of scientific advances in the mid 16th century, especially in anatomy, navigational skills and botany - the latter two spurred on by the fresh stimulus of colonial travel and discovery. But the fact that this treatment is relatively brief and relates to a period rather later than the "high Renaissance" should give us pause if we are inclined to think of this as an epoch of spectacular scientific progress.

Many scholars have pointed out that the 15th and early 16th centuries are a rather stagnant period in many areas of natural science compared with some parts of the Middle Ages, when astronomy, mechanics and logic made substantial advances. The great 16th-century exception, Copernicus's treatise of 1543 on the circulation of planets around the sun, was not a dramatic and total rejection of earlier astronomical method based on new scientific evidence, but a refinement designed to clear up the mathematics of charting the heavenly bodies. It was received with interest and some enthusiasm at the time, but was clearly not seen as a radical departure from the principles of Aristotle. Only with slightly later figures like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) did actual observation of the heavens play a decisive part in the argument.

The uncomfortable truth is that the age of the Renaissance contributed very little to innovation in science. This was largely because the revival of classical learning and languages concentrated attention on what was called humanitas - literary and rhetorical accomplishment (hence our designation of some academic subjects as "humanities") - rather than on empirical observation or technical skill in logic and mathematics.

Later medieval philosophy had become achingly technical, and the recovery of classical literature offered a welcome relief. The writings of the medievals were mocked for their stylistic awfulness; and the exhilaration and enthusiasm for the Platonic tradition that arose in the later 15th century was, as much as anything, an enthusiasm for a philosophy that more obviously promised moral and spiritual insight, rather than the virtuoso analysis of concepts. So might a 20th-century student have felt on reading Jean-Paul Sartre after an unbroken diet of logical positivism in undergraduate philosophy.

For good and ill, the Renaissance as an intellectual phenomenon was not a revolt in the name of "reason" or "liberty" or any such Enlightenment motive. It was an excited recovery of the ideals of formal elegance and proportion in writing and building. It was also the flowering of a sort of New Age fascination with ancient and hidden wisdom. The great strength of Professor Fletcher's book is that it helps us keep the Renaissance in proportion, rather than seeing it as either the decisive foundation for Western modernity (it was in many ways backward-looking, its energy linked to models of revival and recovery rather than advance), or a melodrama of Olympian geniuses and (literally) Machiavellian villains.

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