The writers who lived during the Renaissance praised their own generation, calling it a time when learning flourished. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Those who seriously investigated mathematics or physics during the Renaissance were lonely souls, ridiculed by their contemporaries. Historian John H. Plumb writes:
The frequency of assassination, the perennial plots, the constant vicissitudes, encouraged superstition and a romantic view of Fate. Men felt themselves to be the prey of strange destinies and turned to astrologers and magicians to strengthen their hope, to check despair, and to help them meet the uncertain future with confidence. The stars were studied as intensely as diplomatic dispatches, as a guide to action; and superstitious dread threaded the daily course of men's lives.
A narcissistic age, filled with ambitious grasping at reputation or power, is a more accurate description of the Renaissance. Those who wrote often wrote to emote or to impress, and rarely to attempt a crystallization of truth. Historian Lynn Thorndike writes that
Italian humanism produced relatively little of scientific or philosophical importance from its investigation of the classical past: Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo said that the subtleties of arithmetic and geometry were not worthy of a cultivated mind. In any case, most available works of Greek science had already been translated into Latin before 1300.
Who was this Leonardo Bruni? He was an author who wrote about political intrigues in the city and republic of Florence; he served for a time in the Vatican as a bureaucrat and later in the government of Florence; and he translated Greek literature into Latin. He was known for having a rather artistic style in his Latin prose. The point is this: He was not a mathematician, a philosopher, or a scientist in the sense of the modern observational or natural sciences. He was more interested in political machinations than in calculating the force of gravity; he was more interested in peddling influence than in applying the quadratic equation. A man of his time, born in 1370 - a Renaissance man - he was little interested in the powers of reason. Frederick Maurice Powicke writes that modern science was
made possible by the earlier, medieval belief in the reasonableness of the world.
The underlying notion that algebra can describe the natural laws of the universe - that objects act in accord with rules which can be expressed in equations - arises from the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages. The medievals understood that chemistry and physics describe processes in terms of laws:
the belief in law was at the root of the new investigation into facts.
The birth of modern chemistry and physics during the Middle Ages, this "new investigation into facts," would have to wait out the Renaissance before it could resume the rationalism which it began. The scholasticism of the Middle Ages - Aquinas, Anselm, Abelard, Ockham - led to the rationalism of Descarte, Leibniz, and Spinoza - and to the modernism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The Renaissance constituted a pause in this development of human reason. As Thorndike writes,
The fact that Valla's treatise on novelties unknown to the ancients has not survived indicates that his age was more interested in classical antiquity than in recent inventions. Of the three inventions that used to be associated with the Renaissance, namely the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing with moveable types, only the last can still be ascribed to the period, since the other two are now known to date back at least to the 13th century.
Lorenzo Valla died in Italy in 1457, his best work unappreciated by his contemporaries - a man interested in technological innovations living during the Renaissance's studied ignorance of such applied science.
Although many older history textbooks still recite the fairy-tale of the Renaissance as an era of learning, scholars have seen that the main achievements of the Renaissance were taking credit for the accomplishments of the Middle Ages and publicizing itself as an era far more rational than it actually was.
