NCERT Book Class 11 History Chapter 5 Changing Cultural Traditions

THEME 106 THEMES IN WORLD H ISTORY

5 Changing Cultural
Traditions

FROM the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, towns
were growing in many countries of Europe. A distinct ‘urban
culture’ also developed. Townspeople began to think of themselves
as more ‘civilised’ than rural people. Towns – particularly
Florence, Venice and Rome – became centres of art and learning.
Artists and writers were patronised by the rich and the
aristocratic. The invention of printing at the same time made books
and prints available to many people, including those living in
distant towns or countries. A sense of history also developed in
Europe, and people contrasted their ‘modern’ world with the
‘ancient’ one of the Greeks and Romans.
Religion came to be seen as something which each individual
should choose for himself. The church’s earth-centric belief was
overturned by scientists who began to understand the solar
system, and new geographical knowledge overturned the Europe-
centric view that the Mediterranean Sea was the centre of
the world.

There is a vast amount of material on European history from
the fourteenth century – documents, printed books, paintings,
sculptures, buildings, textiles. Much of this has been carefully
preserved in archives, art galleries and museums in Europe
and America.
From the nineteenth century, historians used the term
‘Renaissance’ (literally, rebirth) to describe the cultural
changes of this period. The historian who emphasised these
most was a Swiss scholar – Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) of
the University of Basle in Switzerland. He was a student
of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886).
Ranke had taught him that the primary concern of the
historian was to write about states and politics using papers
and files of government departments. Burckhardt was
dissatisfied with these very limited goals that his master had
set out for him. To him politics was not the be-all and end-
all in history writing. History was as much concerned with
culture as with politics.
In 1860, he wrote a book called The Civilisation of the
Renaissance in Italy, in which he called his readers’ attention
to literature, architecture and painting to tell the story of how
a new ‘humanist’ culture had flowered in Italian towns from