Author Topic: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant  (Read 370444 times)

Brian

  • Posts: 221
    • Brian's Den
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1440 on: July 26, 2011, 08:28:16 PM »

"I want to know what were the steps by which
man passed from barbarism to civilization (Voltaire)"

 



What are our origins?
Where are we now?
Where are we headed?
Share your thoughts with us!
  Volume Five (The Renaissance)
       
"Four elements constitute Civilization -- economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. "
  
"I shall proceed as rapidly as time and circumstances will permit, hoping that a few of my contemporaries will care to grow old with me while learning. "
        
"These volumes may help some of our children to understand and enjoy the infinite riches of their inheritance."
        
"Civilization begins where chaos and insecurity ends."




In this volume the  term "Renaissance" refers only to Italy. Will Durant studies the growth of industry, the rise of banking families like the Medici, the conflicts of labor and capital and considers the reasons why Italy was the first nation, and Florence the first city in Italy, to feel the awakening of the modern mind. He follows the cultural flowering from Florence to Milan, Mantua, Ferrata, Verona and Venice, Padua and Parma, Bologna, Rimini, Urbino, Perugia, Siena, and Naples.  

In each city of Italy we witness a colorful pageant of princes, queeens, dukes, or doges -- of poets, historians, scientists, and philosophers -- of painters, sculptors, engravers, illuminators, potters, and architects -- of industry, education, manners, morals, crime, and dress -- of women and love and marriage -- of epidemics, famines, earthquakes, and death.

Dr. Durant draws vivid vignettes -- of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cosimo de' Medici, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Beatrice and Isabella d'Este, Leonardo da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Signorelli, Perugino, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Aldus Manutius, Correggio, Alexander VI, Caesar and Lucrezia Borgia, Julius II, Leo X, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

The Renaissance, by recalling classic culture, ended the thousand year rule of the Oriental mind in Europe.


This volume, then, is about YOU. Join our group daily and listen to what Durant and the rest of us are saying. Better yet, share with us your opinions.

SeniorLearn Contact: JoanK & Discussion Facilitator: Trevor
 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3kings(Trevor)

  • Posts: 347
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1441 on: July 31, 2011, 12:18:08 AM »
The Durants'  SoC
Vol V  The Renaissance
Pages 571-575


                                        The Morals of the Clergy.
The Church might have sustained the supernatural sanctions provided by the Hebraic Scriptures and the Christian tradition, if her personnel had led lives of decency and devotion. But most of them accepted the bad as well as the good in the morals of the time, and reflected the antithetical facets of the laity. The parish priest was a simple ministrant, usually of slight education, but normally leading an exemplary life; ignored by the intelligentsia but welcomed by the people. Among the bishops  and abbots there were some high livers, but many good men; and perhaps half the college of cardinals maintained a pious Christian conduct that shamed the gay worldliness of their colleagues. All over Italy there were hospitals, orphan asylums. schools, almshouses, loan offices and other charitable institutions managed by the clergy. The Benedictine, Observantine, and Carthusian monks were honored for the relatively high moral level of their lives. Missionaries faced a thousand dangers to spread the faith in “heathen “ lands and among the pagans of Christiandom. Mystics hid themselves away from the violence of the times, and sought closer communion with God.

Amid this devotion there was much laxity of morals among the clergy and a thousand testimonies could be adduced to prove it. The same  Petrarch who remained faithful to Christianity to the end, and who drew a favourable picture of discipline and piety in the Carthusian monastery where his brother lived, repeatedly  denounced the morals of the clergy on Avignon. From the novel of Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, through those of Masaccio in the fifteenth, to those of Bandello in the sixteenth, the loose lives of the Italian clergy form a recurrent theme of Italian  literature. Boccaccio speaks of “the lewd and filthy life of the clergy” in sins “natural or sodomitical.” Apparently the nuns, who today are angels and  ministers of grace, shared in the revelry. They were especially lively in Venice, where monasteries and nunneries were sufficiently close to each other to allow their inmates, now and then, to share a bed; the archives of the “Proveditori sopra monasteri” contain twenty volumes of trials for the cohabitation of monks and nuns. Aretino speaks unquotably about the nuns of Venice. And Guicciardini, usually temperate, loses his poise in describing Rome. “ Of the court of Rome it is impossible to speak   with sufficient severity, for it is a standing infamy, an example of all that is most vile and shameful in the world”.

These testimonies seem exaggerated and may be prejudiced. Here again we must discount something since no saint can be trusted to speak of human conduct without indignation.

But we accept the summing up of a catholic historian: “it is not surprising, when the higher ranks of  clergy were in such a state, that among the regular orders and secular priests, vice and irregularities of all sorts should have become more and more common. The salt of the earth had lost its savor.... It was such priests as these that gave occasion to the more or less exaggerated descriptions of the clergy by Erasmus and Luther, who visited Rome during the reign of Julius II. But it is a mistake to suppose that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere; there is documentary evidence of the immorality of priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula. In many places -- Venice for instance -- matters were far worse than in Rome. No wonder, as contemporary writers sadly testify, the influence of the clergy had declined, and that in many places hardly any respect was shown for the priesthood. Their immorality was so gross that suggestions in favor of allowing priests to marry began to be heard..... Many of the monasteries were in deplorable condition. The three essential vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were in some convents almost entirely disregarded.... The discipline of many convents of nuns was equally lax.”

Less forgivable than irregularities of sex and festivities of diet were the activities of the Inquisition. But these remarkably declined in Italy during the fifteenth century. In 1440 Amadeo de’ Landi, a mathematician, was tried on a charge of materialism, but was acquitted. In 1478 Galeotto Marcio was condemned to death for writing that any man who lived a good life would go to heaven whatever his religion might be; but Pope Sixtus IV saved him. In 1497 the physician Gabriele da Salo was protected from the Inquisition by his patients, though he maintained that Christ was not God but was the son of Joseph and Mary, conceived in the usual ridiculous way; that Christ’s body was not in the consecrated wafer; and that  His  miracles had been performed not by divine power but through the influence of the stars; so one myth drives out another.

Amid the ecclesiastical decay were several centres of wholesome reform. The outstanding effort at monastic reform in this age was the foundation of the Capuchin Order. Matteo di Bassi, a friar of the Franciscan Observantines at Montefalcone, thought he saw St. Francis in a vision, and that he heard him say: “I wish my rule to be observed to the letter, to the letter, to the letter.” Learning that St. Francis had worn a four cornered pointed hood, he adopted that headdress. Going to Rome, he secured from Clement VII (1528) permission to establish a new branch of the Franciscans distinguished by the  cappuccio or cowl, and by firm adherence to the final rule of St. Francis. They dressed in the coarsest cloth, went barefoot throughout the year, lived on bread, vegetables, fruit and water, kept rigorous fasts, dwelt in narrow cells in poor cottages made of wood and loam, and never journeyed except on foot. The new order was not numerous, but it gave a stirring example and stimulus to the more widespread self reform that came to the monastic and medicant orders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Some of these reforms were undertaken in response to the Protestant Reformation. Many of them were of spontaneous generation, and indicated a saving vitality in Christianity and the Church.

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1442 on: August 01, 2011, 02:55:34 PM »
Durant writes.......

Quote
....there was much laxity of morals among the clergy and a thousand testimonies could be adduced to prove it.

Durant continues with an excuse for the clergy........

Quote
These testimonies seem exaggerated and may be prejudiced. Here again we must discount something since no saint can be trusted to speak of human conduct without indignation.

This last quote of Durant's has made me so angry that my rebuttal will probably not do me justice.

Now if Durant was speaking of simple private citizens, unless it harmed others, most people would not care about their conduct. But Durant is not speaking about them at all. He is speaking about the clergy in the Catholic church. He will accept generalizations about them, as long as it is not specific.

How would civilization continue, if noone kicked A** and took names. It would be every man for himself without laws and certainly no way to enforce them. If a man was killed and his killer was known, but no one could actually name the killer, because others had done the same thing somewhere.

Those who join the priesthood are selling purity and poverty. They take vows to uphold those traits themselves while selling it to the average man and woman. For Durant to say that even a saint cannot criticize them for their own refusal to follow the church laws is not only ridiculious but obscene.

That is how pedeophiles, perverts, and thieves have survived in the church for centuries without ever having to answer for their crimes. Those who covered it up for the perps, are as gulity as the ones committing the crime. That has worked well for the church who continue to cover-up and hide their own depravity.

If you are selling ice cream and giving the customer a cup of dung for money, then you deserve to be exposed as a crook, liar, and common criminal.

All the Arab cults teach the rabble (those they consider beneath them) that they are not to judge others. Only their false gods can give judgement, and they are talking about themselves of course (the priest, the rabbi, and the mullah).

What a scam!

Emily

3kings(Trevor)

  • Posts: 347
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1443 on: August 09, 2011, 11:35:01 PM »
Durants' SoC
The Renaissance
Pages  575-580

                                     III.   Sexual morality.
It is not clear that adultery was less popular in the Middle Ages than in the Renaissance
And as medieval adultery was tempered with chivalry, so in the Renaissance it was softened, in the leisure classes, by an idealization of the refinement and spiritual charms of the educated woman. Greater equality of the sexes in education and social standing made  possible a new intellectual comradeship between men and women.

Girls of good family were kept on relative seclusion from men not of their own household. They were sedulously instructed in the advantages of premarital chastity; sometimes with such success that we hear of a young woman drowning herself after being raped. Nevertheless there must have been considerable premarital adventure; otherwise it would be difficult to account for the extraordinary number of bastards to be found in any Renaissance city. Not to have bastards was a distinction; to have them was no serious disgrace; the man on marrying, usually persuaded his wife to let his illegitimate progeny join the household and to be brought up with her own children To be a bastard was no great disability; the social stigma involved was almost negligible; legitimation could be obtained by lubricating an ecclesiastical hand. In default of legitimate and competent heirs bastard sons could succeed to estate, even a throne, as Ferante I succeeded Alfonso I at Naples, and Leonello d‘Este succeeded Niccolo III at Ferrara. When Pius II came to  Ferrara in 1459 he was received by seven princes, all illegitimate.
The rivalry of bastards with legitimate sons was a rich source of Renaissance violence.

As for homosexuality, it became almost an obligatory part of the Greek revival. The humanists wrote about it with a kind of scholarly affection. Aretino described the aberration as quite popular in Rome, and he himself, between one mistress and another, asked the duke of Mantua to send him an attractive boy. The council noted that some men had taken to wearing feminine garb, and that some women were adopting male attire, and called it a “species of sodomy”. Likewise, with prostitution. According to Infessura-- who liked to load his statistics against papal Rome-- there were 6,800 registered prostitutes in Rome in 1490, not counting clandestine practitioners, in a population of 90,000.

As wealth and refinement increased, a demand  arose for courtesans with some education, and social charm; and as in the Athens of Sophocles, hetaerae rose to meet this demand. The most renowned of these ‘cortigiane oneste’ was Imperia de Cugnatis. Made rich by her patron Agostino Chigi, she adorned her house with luxurious furniture and choice art, and gathered about her a bevy of scholars, artists, poets, and churchmen; even the pious Sadoleto sang her praise. She died in the flower of her beauty at the age of twenty-six        ( 1511) and received honorable burial in the church of San Gregrio, with a marble tomb engraved in the finest lapidary style. The devotions of the troubadours, the Vita Nuova of Dante, and Plato’s discourses on spiritual love had begotten in a few circles a fine sentiment of adoration toward women-- usually another man’s wife. Most people paid no attention to the idea, preferring their love in a frankly sensual form; They might write sonnets, but their goal was coitus; and hardly once in a hundred cases, did they marry the object of their love.

For marriage was an affair of property, and property could not be made dependent upon the passing whims of physical desire. Betrothals were arranged by family councils, and most young people accepted without effectual protest the mates so assigned to them. Girls could be betrothed at the age of three, though marriage had to be delayed till twelve. In the fifteenth century a daughter unmarried at fifteen was a family disgrace. Men, who enjoyed all the privileges and facilities of promiscuity, could be lured into marriage only by brides bringing substantial dowries. Florence established a kind of state dowry insurance-- 'Monte delle faniulle,' or fund of the maidens-- from which marriage portions were given to girls that had paid small yearly premiums. In Siena there were so many bachelors that the laws had to inflict legal disabilities upon them; in Lucca a decree of 1454 debarred from public office all unmarried men between twenty and fifty. Raphael painted half a hundred Madonnas, but would not take a wife; and this was the one thing in which Michelangelo agreed with him.

Weddings themselves consumed enormous sums; Leonardo Bruni complained that his matrimonium had squandered his patrimonium. Kings and queens, princes and princesses spent half a million dollars on a wedding while famine raged among the people. After marriage the woman usually kept her own name; so Lorenzo’s wife continued to be called Donna Clarise Orsini; sometimes however, the wife might add her husband’s name to her own-- Maria Salviati de’ Medici. In the medieval theory of marriage it was expected that love would develop between man and wife through the varied partnerships of marriage in joy and sorrow, prosperity and adversity; and apparently the expectation was fulfilled in the majority of cases. No loyalty could have been greater than that of Elisabetta Gonzaga, accompanying her crippled husband through all his misfortunes and exiles, and faithful to his memory till her death.

Nevertheless adultery was rampant. Since most marriages among the upper classes were diplomatic unions of economic or political interests, many husbands felt warranted in having a mistress; and the wife, though she might mourn, usually closed her eyes -- or lips --to the offence. Among the middle classes some men assumed adultery was a legitimate diversion; Machiavelli and his friends seem to have thought nothing of exchanging notes about their infidelities. When in such cases, the wife avenged herself by imitation, the husband was like as not to ignore it, and wear his horns with grace. But the influx of Spaniards in to Italy, via Naples and Alexander VI and Charles V, brought the Spanish  “ point of honor” into Italian life, and in the sixteenth century the husband felt called upon to punish his wife’s adultery with death, while preserving his pristine privileges unimpaired. The husband might desert his wife and still prosper; the deserted wife had no remedy except to reclaim her dowry, return to her relatives, and live a lonely life; she was not allowed to marry again. She might enter a convent, but it would expect a donation of her dowry. In general, in the Latin countries, adultery is condoned as a substitute for divorce.


Frybabe

  • Posts: 10024
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1444 on: August 10, 2011, 08:23:38 AM »
I recently finished a 1904 biography of Lucretia Borgia. Actually, I think the book was somewhat mistitled. Since the book was taken entirely from legitimate records (legal documents, household accounts and letters) most of it was not about LB but about the society that surrounded her. The book paid some attention to dress, travel and visits to other households, and a detailed description of LB's wedding preparations for her marriage to Alphonso de Este. Mistresses and bastards were certainly not neglected or shamed when it came to the men. LB, however, was not as fortunate. Unsubstantiated rumors that she had lovers were a scandal and may have been the reason for at least one man's murder.


mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1445 on: August 10, 2011, 05:15:27 PM »
..........and so it goes! Humankind seems to be ever generous and greedy, unfaithful, creative, power-seeking, vengeful, spiritual and religious. ...... Jean

3kings(Trevor)

  • Posts: 347
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1446 on: August 14, 2011, 12:31:55 AM »
Durants'  SoC
Vol. V  The Renaissance
Pages 580-581


                                                 IV   Renaissance Man.
The combination of intellectual enfranchisement and moral release produced ”the man of the Renaissance.”He was not typical enough to merit that title; there were a dozen types of man in that age as in any other; he was merely the most interesting, perhaps because he was exceptional. The Renaissance peasant was what peasants have always been until machinery made agriculture an industry. The Italian proletaire of 1500 was like those of Rome under the Caesars or Mussolini; occupation makes the man. The Renaissance businessman was like his past and present peers. The Renaissance priest however, was different from the medieval or modern priest; he believed less, and enjoyed more; he could make love and war. Amid these types was an arresting mutation, a sport of the species and the time, the kind of man we think of when we recall the Renaissance, a type unique in history, except that Alcibiades, seeing him, would have felt reborn.

The qualities of this type revolved about two foci; intellectual and moral audacity. A mind sharp, alert, versatile, open to every impression and idea, sensitive to beauty, eager for fame. It was a recklessly individualistic spirit set on developing all its potential capacities; a proud spirit, scorning Christian humility, despising weakness and timidity, defying conventions, morals, taboos, popes, even, occasionally, God. In the city such a man might lead a turbulent faction;  in the state, an army; in the Church he would gather a hundred benefices under his cassock, and use his wealth to climb to power. In art he was no longer an artisan working anonymously with others on a collective enterprise, as in the middle ages;  he was a single and separate person who stamped  his character upon his works, signed his name to his paintings, even, now and then, carved it on his statues, like Michelangelo on the Pieta. What ever his achievements, this “ Renaissance man” was always in motion and discontent, fretting at limits, longing to be a “universal man” – bold in conception, decisive in deed, eloquent in speech, skilled in art, acquainted with literature and philosophy, at home with women in the palace and with soldiers in the camp.

His immorality was part of his individualism. His goal being the successful expression of his personality, and his environment imposing upon him no standards of restraint either from the example of the clergy, or from the terror of supernatural creed, he allowed himself any means to his ends, and any pleasure on the way. None the less he had his own virtues. He was a realist, and seldom talked nonsense except to a reluctant woman. He had good manners when he was not killing, and even then he preferred to kill with grace. He had energy, force of character, direction and unity of will; he accepted the old Roman conception of virtue as manliness, but added to it skill and intelligence. He was not needlessly cruel, and excelled the Romans in his capacity for pity. He was vain, but that was part of  his sense of beauty and form. His appreciation of the beautiful in woman and nature, in art and crime, was a mainspring of the Renaissance. He replaced the moral with the aesthetic sense; If his type had multiplied and prevailed, an irresponsible aristocracy of taste would have supplanted the aristocracies of birth and wealth.

But again, he was only one of many kinds of Renaissance man. How different was the idealistic Pico, with his belief in the moral perfectibility of mankind--- or the grim Savonarola, blind to beauty and absorbed in righteousness—or the gentle gracious Raphael, scattering beauty about him with an open hand—or the demonic Michelangelo, haunted with the last judgment long before he painted it – or the melodious  Politian who thought there would be pity even in hell—or the honest Vittorino da Feltre, so successfully binding Zeno to Christ—or the second Giuliano de Medicci, so kindly that his brother  the Pope considered him unfit for Government. We perceive, after every effort to abbreviate and formulate, that there was no “Man of the Renaissance.” There were men agreeing only in one thing: that life had never been lived so intensely before. The Middle Ages had said – or had pretended to say – No to life; the Renaissance, with all its heart and soul and might, said Yes.



JoanK

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 8685
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1447 on: August 14, 2011, 06:14:19 PM »
We have left the Greeks and Romans behind, but we still neeed to read what they wrote. We are picking a new classic book or play to read in October. Come and join us.


Look at the list and discussion here: http://seniorlearn.org/forum/index.php?topic=2395.40

Vote here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CRGVGSH

3kings(Trevor)

  • Posts: 347
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1448 on: August 19, 2011, 12:02:11 AM »
Durants' SoC.
Vol. V   The Renaissance
Pages 581-586






                                         Renaissance woman.
The emergence of woman was one of the brightest phases of the period. Her status in European history has usually risen with wealth, though Peri clean Greece, too near the Orient, was an exception. When hunger is no longer feared, the male quest turns to sex; and if a man still despoils himself for gold, it is it lay it at a woman’s feet, or before the children she has given him. If she resists he idealizes her. Usually she has the good sense to resist him, and to make him pay dearly for the boons whose contemplated splendour swells his veins. If, moreover she adds graces of mind and character to her body’s charms, she gives man the highest satisfaction he can find this side of glory; and in return raises her to an almost queenly dominance in his life.

We must not imagine that this was the pleasant role of the average woman in the Renaissance; it fell to a fortunate few, while the far greater number put off their bridal robes to carry domestic burdens and family headaches to their graves. Hear San Bernardino on the proper time for beating a wife:

“And I say to you men, never beat your wives while they are great with child, for therein would lie great peril. I say not that you should never beat them; but choose your time...... I know men who have more regard for a hen that lays fresh eggs daily than for their own wives. Sometimes the hen will break a pot or cup, but the man will not beat her, for fear of losing the eggs that are her fruit. How stark mad, then,  are many the cannot suffer a word from their own lady who bears such fair fruit! For if she speak more than he thinks fit, forthwith he seizes a staff and begins to chastise her; and the hen, which cackles all day without ceasing, you suffer patiently for her egg’s sake.”

A girl of good family was carefully trained for success in getting and keeping a prosperous mate; this was the major subject of her curriculum. Till a few weeks before marriage she was kept in relative seclusion in a convent or in a home, and received from her tutors or nuns an education as thorough as that which came to all but the scholars among the men of her class. Usually she learned some Latin, and became distantly acquainted with the leading figures of Greek and Roman history, literature, and philosophy She practised some form of music and sometimes played at sculpture or painting. A few women became scholars, and publicly debated problems of philosophy with men, but this was highly exceptional. But the educated woman of the Renaissance retained her femininity, her Christianity, and its moral code; and this gave her a union of culture and character that made her irresistible to the higher Renaissance man.

Not content with these gifts, Renaissance woman, like any other, dyed her hair-- almost always blonde-- and added false locks to fill it out; peasant women, having spent their beauty, cut off their tresses and hung them out for sale. Perfumes were a mania in sixteenth-century Italy: Hair, hats, shirts, stockings, gloves, shoes, all had to be scented; Artetino thanks Duke Cosimo for perfuming a roll of money he had sent him; “ some objects that date from that period have not yet lost their odor.”A well to do woman’s dressing table was a wilderness of cosmetics, usually in containers of ivory, silver, or gold. Rouge was applied not only to the face but to the breasts, which in larger cities were left mostly bare. Pearls, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, agates, amethysts, beryls, topazes, or garnets adorned the fingers in rings. the arms in bracelets, the head in tiaras, and after 1525, the ears in earrings; beside which jewellery might be studded into headgear, the dress, the shoes, and the fan.

The educated women of the Renaissance emancipated themselves without any propaganda of emancipation, purely by their intelligence, character, and tact, and by the heightened sensitivity of men to their tangible and intangible charms. They influenced their time in every field; in politics by their ability to govern states for their absent husbands; in morals by their combination of freedom, good manners, and piety; in art by developing a matronly beauty which modelled a hundred Madonnas; in literature by opening their homes and their smiles to poets and scholars. There were innumerable satires on women, as in every age; but for every bitter or sarcastic line there were litanies of devotion and praise. The Italian Renaissance, like the French enlightenment, was bisexual. Women moved into every sphere of life, men ceased to be coarse and crude, and were moulded to finer manners and speech; and civilization, with all its laxity and violence, took on a grace and refinement such as it had not known in Europe for a thousand years.



Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1449 on: August 28, 2011, 10:50:55 PM »
Durant in his first paragraph must be describing himself, as that description fits no man I've ever read about in history.

The ninety nine and nine tenths of women during the Renaissance were mentioned in passing as having to cut and sell their hair, probably to keep their children from starving. They also get a description as to when they can be beaten (not while 'heavy' with child), so most of their life was a 'headache' according to Durant.

Poor women in India still sell their hair, probably for the same reasons as women five hundred years ago. So nothing really changes much, except at least in this country if your husband decides to beat you, he can be charged with assault and sent away (hopefully).

Nothing has changed in the type of women (rich) being written about today. I have a stack of New Yorkers (I'm behind) on my table and have read five today. The women I've read profiles on, are women who are rich, and I disagree with everything they espouse. I find nothing to warrant their inclusion for a profile.

So five hundred years from now when someone digs out an old New Yorker or Vanity Fair and reads about how life was at the turn of the century, they will only know the superficial, manilupative, deceptive, shallow people put in those pages. Many of them also have unreadable books out too, which is a bad omen for how we will be remembered if the next 'Durant' finds them.

Emily

  

 

JoanK

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 8685
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1450 on: August 29, 2011, 02:53:34 PM »
A friend completely stumped me yesterday by asking how many women are named in the bible. I had no idea. Do you?

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1451 on: August 29, 2011, 04:29:51 PM »
JoanK, there are 188 women combined in the Hebrew bible and the New Testament.

These are women that have been 'named' usually as the 'sister of', 'wife of, or 'daughter of' some man the story is about.

I searched for a list and found it on Wikipedia that gives a short description and location where they can be found in both bibles. Some people have waaaaaaay too much time on their hands, but it does give us an answer to the question. Even with a name, most of these women are nothing more than an unpronounceable name translated into English to make them more presentable to an English speaking audience. We know nothing about the majority, and very little about the others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_Bible

Emily

3kings(Trevor)

  • Posts: 347
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1452 on: September 03, 2011, 11:07:16 PM »
The Durants'  SoC.
Vol V The Renaissance
Pages 586-590




                                             The Home
The rising refinement showed itself in the form and life of the home. While the dwellings of the populace remained as before-- unadorned whitewashed stucco or plaster walls, flagstone floors, an inner court usually with a well, and around the court one or two stories of rooms furnished with the simple necessaries of life-- the palaces of nobles and the nouveaux riches took on a splendour and luxury again recalling Imperial Rome. The wealth that in the middle ages had been concentrated on the cathedral now poured itself out into mansions equipped with such furniture, conveniences, delicacies, and ornaments as could hardly be found north of the alps in the seats of princes and kings. The Villa Chigi and the palazzo Massimi both designed by Baldassare Peruzzi, enclosed a labyrinth of rooms, each ornate with columns and pilasters, or fretted cornice, or gilded cpffered ceilings, or paintings on vault and walls, or sculptured chimney pieces, or stucco carvings and arabesques, or floors of marble or tile. Great fireplaces warmed the rooms, and lamps, torches, or chandeliers lighted them. All that was lacking in these palaces was children.

For family limitation rises as the means of supporting children mount. The Church and the Scriptures bade men increase and multiply, but comfort concealed infertility. Even in the countryside were children were economic assets, families of six children were rare; in the city, where children were liabilities, families were small-- the richer the smaller-- and many homes had no children at all. What lovely children Italian families could have appears in the bambini and putti of the artists. The solidarity of the family, the mutual loyalty and love of parents and children, stand out all the more attractively amid the moral looseness of the times. The family was still an economic, moral, and geographical unit. Usually the debts of one defaulting member were paid by the rest-- a marked exception to the individualism of the age. Rarely did any member marry or leave the state without the family’s consent. Servants were freeborn free spoken members of the family Paternal authority was supreme, and was obeyed in all crises; but normally the mother ruled the household. Maternal love was as found n the princesses as in the paupers. Most families of the middle class kept a register of births, marriages, deaths, and interesting events, interspersed here and there with intimate comments.

                                                         Public Morality.
Commercial and public morality was the least attractive side of Renaissance life. Then, as now, success, not virtue, was the standard by which men were judged. Then, as now, men itched for money, and stretched their consciences to grasp it. Kings and princes betrayed their allies, and broke their most solemn pledges, at the call of gold. Artists were no better: many of them took advance payments, failed to finish or begin the work, but kept the money just the same. The papal court itself gave a high example of money lust; hear again the greatest historian of the papacy;

“A deep-rooted corruption had taken possession of nearly all the officials of the curia.... The inordinate number of gratuities and exactions had passed all bounds. Moreover, on all sides deeds were dishonestly manipulated, and even falsified, by the officials. No wonder that there arose from all parts of Christendom the loudest complaints about the corruption and financial extortions of the papal officials. It was even said that in Rome everything had its price.”

The Church still condemned all taking of interest as usury. Preachers inveighed against it; cities sometimes forbade it under pain of exclusion from the sacraments and from Christian burial. But the lending of money at interest went on, because such loans were indispensable in an expanding commercial and industrial economy. Laws were passed prohibiting a higher rate than twenty per cent, but we hear of cases where thirty per cent was charged. Christians competed with Jews in money lending, and the town council of Verona complained that the Christians exacted harder terms than the Jews; public resentment however fell chiefly on the Jews, and occasionally led to outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence. The Franciscans met the problem for the most helpless borrowers by establishing, through gifts and legacies, ‘monti di pieta’ funds ( literally heaps ) of charity, from which they made loans to the needy, at first without interest. The first of these was organized at Orvieto in 1463; soon every major city had one. Their growth involved expenditures of administration; and the Fifth  Lateran Council (1515) granted the Franciscans the right to charge for each loan an amount necessary to cover the costs of management. Instructed by this experience, some theologians of the sixteenth century allowed a moderate interest on loans. Through the competition of the ‘monti di pieta’, and probably more through the increasing competence and rivalry of the professional bankers, the rate of interest fell rapidly during the sixteenth century.

Industry became more ruthless with its size, and with the disappearance of a personal relationship between employer and employed. Under feudalism the serf enjoyed certain rites along with his burdensome dues: in sickness,economic depression, war, and old age his lord was expected to take care of him. In the cities of Italy the guilds performed something of this function for the better class of labour; but in general the”free’ labourer was free to starve when he could find no work. When he found it, he had to take it on the employer’s terms, and these were hard. Every invention and improvement in production and finance added to profits, rarely to wages. Businessmen  were as severe with one another as with their employees; we hear of their many tricks in competition, their deceptive contracts, their innumerable frauds;  when they cooperated it was to ruin their competitors in another town. However there were instances of a fine sense of honour among many Italian merchants; and the Italian financiers had the best reputation in Europe for integrity.

Social morality was a blend of violence and chastity. In the correspondence of the times we find many evidences of a tender and kindly spirit; and the Italians could not compete with the Spaniards in ferocity, or with the French soldiery in wholesale butchery. And yet no nation in Europe could match the endless merciless slander that swept around all prominent persons in Rome; and who but the Italians of the Renaissance could have called Aretino divine? Family feuds were refreshed by the breakdown of custom and belief, and the inadequate administration of the laws; men took vengeance into their own hands, and families murdered one another for generations. At ferrara , as late as 1537, duelling to the death was legal and practised; even boys were allowed to fight each other with knives in these legal lists. A man had to live on the alert in those days; any evening, if he left the house, he might be ambushed and robbed, and be lucky not to be killed; even in church he was not safe; and on the highways he had to be ready for brigands. The Renaissance mind, living amid these dangers, had to be as sharp as an assassin's blade.


mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1453 on: September 04, 2011, 12:39:56 PM »
Thank goodness i was born in the middle of the 20th century in the USA! Women have been able to improve their lives and opportunities. Altho, it still seems as tho human psychological needs keep the same kinds of behavior happening is every era of history.

I wish the Durants had talked some about the kinds of birth control used at this time. How did families limit their numbers of children? I know that condoms were known about - usually made of sheepskin-  but i wonder how many people were using them. Was it merely a matter of abstimence?

Jean

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1454 on: September 04, 2011, 11:10:00 PM »
Hi Jean, Durant only mentions infertility in accounting for the absence of children. He does not mention any types of birth control, although it was practiced as you point out.

We have already read that Rome had doubled and tripled in size as people from the countryside moved to the city. Durant states that children in the cities were a 'liability', unlike in the country where they could help their parents in the fields.

Emily

JoanK

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 8685
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1455 on: September 05, 2011, 10:05:17 PM »
Every "modern" society has gone through a period when people moved to the city: first a period of awful overcrowding, and then a lowered birth rate. It's interesting that the same thing happened that long ago.

JoanP

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 10394
  • Arlington, VA
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1456 on: September 07, 2011, 04:55:49 PM »
Sicne we received word of Eloise's passing last evening, we have been working on a Memorial site where we can share memories of our time with Eloise and words of condolences for Eloise's family.  It will probably won't come as a surprise to them that she was loved, but by so many!

Even if you've expressed some thoughts here since yesterday, will you please repeat them in the site we intend to send on to the family?   Thanks.

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1457 on: September 07, 2011, 09:48:56 PM »
Thank you JoanP for the link for remembering Eloise. I was saddened to hear of her passing.

Emily



3kings(Trevor)

  • Posts: 347
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1458 on: September 11, 2011, 12:21:13 AM »
Durants'  SoC.
Vol. V     The Renaissance.
Pages 593-595



                                             Manners and Amusements.
Amid violence and dishonesty, and the boisterous life of university students, and the rough humor and kindliness of peasant and  proletaire, good manners grew as one of the arts of the Renaissance. Italy now led Europe in personal and social hygiene, dress, table manners, cooking, conversation, and recreations; and in all these except dress Florence claimed to lead Italy. Florence patriotically mourned the filth of other cities, and Italians made ‘Tedesco’, (German), a synonym for courseness of language and life. The old Roman habit of frequent bathing continued in the educated classes; the well-to-do displayed their finery and “took the waters” at various spas, and drank sulphurous streams as an annual penance to purge digestive sins.  Male dress was as ornate as female, except for jewelry: tight sleeves and colored hose, and such wonderous baggy bonnets as Raphael caught on Castiglione. Hose ran up the legs to the loins, splitting men into tunic and silk frills and ruffles of lace; even gloves and shoes sported wisps of lace. At a tournament given by Lorenzo de’ Medici, his brother Giuliano wore garments costing 8000 ducats.

A revolution in table manners came in the fiffteenth century with the increasing sustitution of a fork for fingers in carrying food to the mouth. Thomas Coryat, touring Italy about 1600, was struck by the novel custom,”which”, he wrote, “is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels”; and he shared in introducing the idea into England. Knives, forks, and spoons were of brass, sometimes of silver—which was lent out to neighbors preparing banquets. Meals were modest except on such occasions or at State functions;  then excess  was compulsory. Spices—pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, juniper, ginger etc.—were used in abundance to flavor food and stimulate thirst; hence every host offered his guests a variety of wines. The reign of garlic in Italy , can be traced back to 1548, but doubtless had begun long before. There was very little drunkeness or gluttony; the Italians of the Renaissance, like the later French, were gourmets, not gourmands. When men were apart from their  families they might invite a courtesan or two, as Aretino did when he entertained Titian. More careful people would grace the meal with music, poetic improvisations, and educated conversation.

The art of conversation—‘bel parlare’—to speak with intelligence, urbanity, courtesy, clarity, and wit—was reinvented by the Renaissance. Greece and Rome had known it, and here and there in medieval  Italy—as at  the courts of Frederic II and Innocent III – it had been kept precariously alive. Now in Lorenzo’s Florence, in Elizabetta’s Urbino, in Leo’s Rome, it flourished again: nobles and their ladies, poets and philosophers, generals and scholars, artists and musicians met in the companionship of minds, quoted famous authors, made an occasional obeisance to religion, graced their language with a light fantastic touch, and basked in one another’s  audience. Such  conversation was so admired that many essays and treatises were cast in dialogue form to appropriate its elegance. In the end the game was carried to excess; language and thought became too precious and refined; an enervating dilettantism softened manliness. Urbino became Rambouillet in France, and Moliere attacked ‘les precieuses’ just in time to save the art of good converse for France.
Despite the preciosity of a few , Italian speech enjoyed a freedom of subject and epithet that would not be allowed by social manners today. Since general conversation was rarely heard  by unmarried women of good character, it was assumed that sex might be openly discussed. But beyond this, and even in higher male circles, there was a loosness of sexual jest, a gay freedom in poetry, a course obscenity in drama, that seem to us now among the less presentable aspects of the Renaissance,. Educated men could scribble lewd verses on statuary, the refined Bembo wrote in praise of Priapus. Youths competed in obscenity and profanity to prove their maturity. And yet the phrases of courtesy had never been so flowery, forms of address had never been so gracious; women kissed the hand of any intimate male friend on meeting or leaving him, and men kissed the hand of a woman, presents were ever passing from friend to friend; and tact of word and deed reached a development that seemed unattainable in northern Europe. Italian manuals of manners became favored texts beyond the Alps.

The same was true of Italian handbooks of dancing, fencing, and other recreations; in recreation, as in conversation and profanity, Italy lead the Christian world. Card playing was even more popular than dancing; in the fifteenth century it became a mania in all classes. Often it involved gambling. Men gambled also with dice, and sometimes loaded them. The Council of Ten twice forbade the sale of cards or dice, and called upon servants to report masters violating these ordinances. Young men had their special games, mostly in the open air. The upperclass Italian was trained to ride, wield sword and lance, and tilt in tournaments. As these combats proved insufficiently mortal, some rash youths,  in the Roman Colosseum in 1332, introduced the bullfight; on that occasion eighteen knights, all of Roman families, were killed, and only eleven bulls.


Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1459 on: September 11, 2011, 08:37:34 PM »
Near Nashville each year a Renaissance Fair is held. An old college friend and her husband attend. They both dress in renaissance style, and she says she orders theirs online.

Here is a link to Renaissance styles for women that can be purchased online. They are supposed to be copies of real Renaissance styles. These are probably more French and English than Italian, since Nashville was founded by a Frenchman and settled by the English and French.

http://www.realarmorofgod.com/store/html/Products/Historical-Clothing/Renaissance-Women/index.html

Emily

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1460 on: September 11, 2011, 08:46:25 PM »
Here is the link for Renaissance styles for men that can be purchased online.

There seems to be something for every class from pirate to king.

http://www.realarmorofgod.com/store/html/Products/Historical-Clothing/Renaissance-Men/index.html

Emily

JoanK

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 8685
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1461 on: September 11, 2011, 08:56:34 PM »
Things I have learned in this discussion keep coming up. In the Plutarch pre-discussion, the question of the transition from vengence as a personal matter to that as a matter for the state has come up with respect to the Oresteia (sp). I always remember discussing here some years ago that every society in it's development must go through that transition before it can be peaceful and well ordered.

mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1462 on: September 12, 2011, 02:14:01 PM »
 It seems strange to me that no one had come up with a "fork" before this time. It just makes so much sense. Of course, the aristocracy led the way in most social things and the way they traveled with hoards of people, i guess it was easier to have people eating with their hands rather than trying to round up a hundred or more pieces of "silverware" when an entourage arrived.

The Durants are a good example of the trend toward "social" history in the first half of the 20th century. Reporting on more than just politics, economics and wars and telling us about lifestyles, etc. Unfortunately, for students everywhere, social history lost some appeal after WWII and women, minorities, labor and regular people's history got lost again, but has made a rousing comeback in the second half of the 20th century. Thank goodness. It makes history much more interesting to many of us.

Jean

mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1463 on: September 12, 2011, 02:19:48 PM »
Interesting look at the clothing. When i visit old houses with their narrow, curved stairs - the Betsy Ross house comes to mind - i think of a woman with a baby on one hip trying to hold up her skirts with the other hand, making her way up those stairs. Or, tending a fire and cooking a meal! Thank goodness for shorter hems in my lifetime!

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1464 on: September 12, 2011, 11:05:10 PM »
Jean, I remember thinking the same thing when I was climbing the back stairs at Mt. Vernon (Washington's home). The stairway was so narrow, only one person at a time could ascend  or descend, and forget about a basket of laundry.

I was still a teenager at the time, but remember thinking, all the public rooms in the house are light and airy, and all the workplaces are cramped or dark.

Emily

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1465 on: September 12, 2011, 11:30:23 PM »
Quote
JoanK

...the transition from vengence as a personal matter to that as a matter for the state........

I have already forgotten the name of the Pope who with his army took over the city of Rome and the Papal states. He dismissed the Roman Senate and government and ruled from the Vatican. Some Popes were good admistrators but many were not.

Durant tells us there were, "inadequate administration of the laws, and men took vengence into their own hands."

Anytime there is a breakdown in 'law and order' there will be chaos and lawlessness. It can happen anywhere, a city, a state, or a country. People must be ruled by laws that are enforced. Without that, civilization goes down the drain.

Somalia is an example. Back to the stone age from the 21st century in a couple of decades.

Emily  

JoeF

  • Posts: 13
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1466 on: September 16, 2011, 10:54:33 PM »
WELCOME, JoeF. Do join us. We have been going 10 years and are up to the 1500s.

We don't need the books to follow, since trevor kindly posts excerpts for us. but I'm sure someone would like a set.

Thank you, JoanK, for your response these several months ago. i had not gotten back to your site until 16Sept, due to my incompetence. i will be reading with you all, and posting from time-to-time. FYI, i live in the northern California's Plumas National Forest.
"The Irish do not lend themselves to psychoanalysis." -- S. Freud

JoanK

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 8685
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1467 on: September 17, 2011, 10:20:45 PM »
That sounds wonderful! I live in the Southern California beach cities. The ocean and wonderful weather (almost) make up for all the traffic.

JoeF

  • Posts: 13
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1468 on: September 18, 2011, 09:08:10 PM »
That sounds wonderful! I live in the Southern California beach cities. The ocean and wonderful weather (almost) make up for all the traffic.
Thanks, Joan, I like Souther Calif, also, but for its huge parking lot, and its air. BTW, i noticed that there was a "+" to the Book discussion's right header. After clicking that button, I found the listing for my posts, and areas of interest. Thank you.
And thank Peranza (sp?) JoeF
"The Irish do not lend themselves to psychoanalysis." -- S. Freud

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1469 on: September 18, 2011, 10:19:47 PM »
Welcome JoeF. I hope you will not only read along with us, but post from time to time on Trevor's selection from Durant's writing.

Emily

mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1470 on: September 19, 2011, 01:31:44 PM »
I just noticed that this site has been read 34,000+ times, isn't that amazing?

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1471 on: September 19, 2011, 04:48:00 PM »
I just noticed that this site has been read 34,000+ times, isn't that amazing?

Jean it does seem amazing, but when you consider that we have been discussing the 'Renaissance' since Nov. 27, 2006 (that will soon be five years), it doesn't seem too much.

We began the 'Renaissance' discussion on SeniorNet five years ago. With the demise of SeniorNet and all the transitions this discussion has endured, it's amazing that we are still here. Mal died before SeniorNet's demise, we had a long hiatus, and then Robby retired from the discussion. Thankfully, we had Trevor who picked up the standard and marched us all forward.

Emily


mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1472 on: September 19, 2011, 07:08:55 PM »
Oh gosh! You mean it doesn't include all the discussion from the beginning of the "story"? That means there must have been 100,000 posts since the beginning!?! I think i came in during the Middle Ages.

3kings(Trevor)

  • Posts: 347
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1473 on: September 19, 2011, 08:01:37 PM »
Durants' SoC.
Vol. V.  The Renaissance.
Pages 605-608.



                                                          PERSPECTIVE
Were the morals of Renaissance Italy really worse than those of other lands and times? It is difficult to make comparisons, since all evidence is a selection. The age of Alcibiades in Athens displayed much of the immorality of the Renaissance in sexual relations and political chicanery; it too practised abortion on a large scale, and cultivated erudite courtesans; it too liberated simultaneously the intellect and the instincts; and, anticipating Machiavelli, Sophists like Thrasybulus in Plato’s ‘Republic’ attacked morality as weakness. Perhaps ( for in these matters we are limited to vague impressions ) there was less violence in classic Greece than in Renaissance Italy, and a bit less corruption in religion and politics. During an entire century of Roman history-- from Caesar to Nero -- we find  greater corruption in government, and a worse breakdown in marriage, than in the Renaissance; but even in that epoch there remained many Stoic virtues in the Roman character; Caesar, with all his ambivalent capacity in bribery and love, was still the greatest general in a nation of generals.

Political deceit, treachery, and crime were probably as rife in France, Germany, and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as in Italy, but those countries had  the wisdom not to produce a Machiavelli to expound and expose the principles of their statecraft. Manners, not morals, were coarser north of the Alps than below them, except for a small class in France-- exemplified by the Chevalier Bayard and Gaston de Foix-- which still retained the better side of chivalry. Given the opportunity, the French were as adept at adultery as the Italians; observe how readily they adopted syphilis; note the sexual melee in the ‘fabliaux’; count the twenty-four mistresses of Duke Philip of Burgundy, and the Agnes Sorels and Dianes de Poitiers of the French kings; read Brantome.

Germany and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were too poor to rival Italy in immorality. Travellers from these countries were astounded by the laxity of Italian life. Luther, visiting Italy in 1511, concluded that  “if there is a hell, then Rome is built upon it; and this I have heard in Rome itself.” He quotes as an established proverb the saying, “Inglese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato:  “An Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate.”  Machiavelli reckoned Italy as “ more corrupt than all other countries; next come the French and the Spaniards.” He admired the Germans and the Swiss as still possessing many of the virile virtues of ancient Rome. We may diffidently conclude that Italy was more immoral because she was richer, weaker in government and the reign of law, and further advanced in that intellectual development which  usually makes for a moral release.

The Italians made some laudable efforts to check license. The vainest of these efforts were the sumptuary regulations that in nearly every state forbade extravagance of immodesty of dress; the vanity of men and women overrode with sly persistence the occasional assiduity of the law. The popes inveighed against immorality, but were in some cases swept along with the stream; their attempts at reforming abuses in the Church were nullified by the inertia or vested interests of the clergy; they themselves were rarely as wicked as passionate history once painted them, but they were  more concerned to re-establish the political power of the papacy than to restore the moral integrity of the Church. Valiant attempts at reform were made by the great preachers of the time, men like St. Bernardino of Siena, Roberto da Lecce, San Giovanni da Capistrano, and Savonarola. They denounced vice with a vivid detail that contributed to their popularity; they persuaded feudalists to forswear revenge and live in peace; they induced governments to release insolvent debtors and let exiles return home; they brought hardened sinners back to long neglected sacraments.

Even these powerful preachers failed. The instincts formed through a thousand years of hunting and savagery had re-emerged through the cracked shell of a morality that had lost the support of religious belief, of respected authority, and established law. The great Church that had once ruled kings could no longer govern or cleanse itself. The destruction of civil liberty in state after state had dulled the civic sense that had enfranchised and ennobled the medieval communes; where there had been citizens there were now only  individuals. Excluded from Government and flush with wealth, men turned to the pursuit of pleasure, and foreign invasion surprised  them in siren arms. The city states had for two centuries directed their forces, their subtlety, and their treachery against one another; it was now impossible for them to unite against a common foe. Preachers like Savanarola, rebuffed in all pleas for reform, called down the judgment of heaven upon Italy, and predicted the destruction of Rome and the break-up of the Church. France, Spain,and Germany, weary of sending tribute to finance the wars of the Papal States and the luxuries of Italian life, looked with amazement and envy at a peninsula so shorn of will and power, so inviting in beauty and wealth. The birds of prey gathered to feast on Italy.


JoanK

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 8685
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1474 on: September 19, 2011, 08:42:56 PM »
I came in just at the start of Rome, and asked if it was too late to join!!

Frybabe

  • Posts: 10024
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1475 on: September 19, 2011, 08:45:49 PM »
Quote
The birds of prey gathered to feast on Italy.

I can't wait for the next installment.

mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1476 on: September 20, 2011, 03:20:49 PM »
What an interesting comparison....who is more or less moral and why? Does wealth make people less moral, or is it just more obvious, or do the poor have less time and energy to indulge in immoral behavior?? Advanced Intellectual development makes for moral release??? 

Can one (Machiavelli, ex)  judge one's own culture against others of which we have less knowledge? Doesn't what's right in front of us give us more insight than one 100s of miles away? Do we always think those around us are less moral because we know them and their behaviors better than others farther away? Do we idolize those farther from us because we don't see their personal behaviors?

Hasn't humanity always leaned toward immorality?   Therefore the neccesity for law.

Whew!..........Jean

mabel1015j

  • Posts: 3656
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1477 on: September 20, 2011, 03:23:07 PM »
Oh! I meant to say, i'm going to have to pull out Barbata Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, about the fourteenth century, and see what she has to say on morality. I read it so long ago, i don't remember the details.

JoanK

  • BooksDL
  • Posts: 8685
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1478 on: September 20, 2011, 03:27:11 PM »
I don't remember the details either, but I remember she wound up not liking the 14th century very much, and from her book, I agreed with her.

Emily

  • Posts: 365
Re: Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant
« Reply #1479 on: September 21, 2011, 04:05:20 PM »
Durant in comparing Italy to the rest of Europe on the moral issue tells us.............read Brantome

I did not know Brantome, so I looked him up, and found the following.......an excerpt from Wiki.........

Quote
Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur (and abbé) de Brantôme (c. 1540 – 15 July 1614) was a French historian, soldier and biographer.

Brantôme was born in Périgord, Aquitaine, the third son of the baron de Bourdeille. His mother and maternal grandmother were both attached to the court of Marguerite of Navarre, on whose death in 1549 he went to Paris, and later (1555) to Poitiers, to finish his education.

He was given several benefices, the most important of which was the abbey of Brantôme, but had no inclination for an ecclesiastical career.

He became a soldier and came into contact with many of the great leaders of the continental wars. He travelled in Italy; in Scotland, where he accompanied Mary, Queen of Scots (then the widow of Francis II of France); in England, where he saw Elizabeth I (1561, 1579); in Morocco (1564); and in Spain and Portugal.

He fought on the galleys of the Order of Malta, and accompanied his great friend, the French commander Filippo di Piero Strozzi (grandson of Filippo Strozzi the Younger), in his expedition against Terceira, in which Strozzi was killed (1582).

During the French Wars of Religion under Charles IX of France, he fought for the Catholics (including at the Siege of La Rochelle (1572-1573), but he allowed himself to be won over temporarily by the ideas of the Huguenot reformers, and though he publicly separated himself from Protestantism, it had a marked effect on his mind.

A fall from his horse compelled him to retire into private life about 1589, and he spent his last years in writing his Memoirs of the illustrious men and women whom he had known. Brantôme left distinct orders that his manuscript should be printed; a first edition appeared late (1665–1666) and not very complete. Later editions include:

Brantôme can hardly be regarded as a historian proper, and his Memoirs cannot be accepted as a very trustworthy source of information. But he writes in a quaint conversational way, pouring forth his thoughts, observations or facts without order or system, and with the greatest frankness and naiveté.

His works certainly gave an admirable picture of the general court-life of the time, with its unblushing and undisguised profligacy. There is not an homme illustre or a dame galante in all his gallery of portraits who hasn't engaged in what Medieval Christian prescriptions as well as the Victorian society would regard as sexual immorality; and yet the whole is narrated with the most complete unconsciousness that there is anything objectionable in their conduct.

Besides the general promiscuity of the characters, some parts of the work depict in a more or less detailed fashion the practices of homosexualism

Emily