AP European History
AP European History
During the early sixteenth century, while Europe was still in the midst of the sweeping cultural, intellectual, and political changes of the Renaissance, a new phenomenon was being born. The humanism of the Italian Renaissance spread across Europe and affected every aspect of life. One of the areas most affected by humanism was that of religion.
Humanists, especially those of northern Europe, were not antireligious or even anti-Christian. However, there came with humanism a certain desire for a deeper understanding of things. Humanism empowered man to seek God and to seek spiritual truth without an intercessor, like the church. In other words, man no longer needed a priest to talk to God and man no longer needed the pope dictating the will of God. Man was a free being with the ability to ask questions, seek answers, and develop spiritually on his own. According to the church, these notions were heretical.
These ideas about religion sparked a century of turmoil and warfare between the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the pope, and the reformers, who sought a new and different approach to religion. Those reformers became known as Protestants, or those who protested against the church. Initially, the people at the heart of this religious revolution had no intentions other than to reform the existing church and change those things within the church that, in their opinions, had gone wrong over the years. This movement was known as the Reformation.
The Reformation did not begin in the sixteenth century, nor did it arise out of humanist ideas alone. During the fourteenth century, when Europe found itself at the mercy of the bubonic plague, people’s faith in the church, and perhaps even in God, was shaken. Both clergy and laymen alike prayed for deliverance, yet one third of all Europeans died from the disease. As Europe began to recover from the plague, problems within the church began to arise. People began to question the practice of simony, or the selling of church positions. People also began to question whether or not clergymen should hold more than one church position. Neither of these practices, it was argued, seemed to benefit anyone other than the clergy. In addition, clerical positions tended to be quite lucrative in many cases, and people resented that. Not only were the clergy perceived as too wealthy, but the church itself also seemed to have entirely too much money at its disposal. Perhaps the laymen would not have minded so much if the money had been spent on the parishioners. Instead, though, the church spent exorbitant amounts of money on art, architecture, and the extravagant lifestyles of the popes.
Another major problem within the church was the uneducated priests. Many priests could barely read or write in their native language, much less read or write in Latin, the language in which many theological works were written.
The tension had been building for some time when, in the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe (1329-1384) questioned some of the practices of the church. Among other things, Wycliffe argued against the wealth of the church and the selling of indulgences, or the practice of granting the buyer forgiveness for his sins. Wycliffe encouraged people to read the Bible them selves and interpret the Bible themselves, a practice that was unheard of in his day. To aid the people in doing so, Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. Wycliffe’s teachings influenced a Bohemian named Jan Hus (1369-1415). Hus spoke out against the abuses of the church, too, and was later burned at the stake. The execution of Jan Hus did not have the desired effect on Hus’s followers. Instead of squelching the voices that spoke out against the church, the execution incited a rebellion that took some time to put down. Wycliffe and Hus were both forerunners of the Reformation that was to follow in the next century.