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readallthenewberys2012-09-10 06:54 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-09-10 06:54 pm
Newbery Medal: The Story of Mankind (Hendrik Willem van Loon), Part 4
And that's the first third of the book done with. I'm never going to finish if I don't speed up, but I really do want to do it justice... :P Part of the trouble is just that nonfiction is really dense compared to fiction. But the chronic googling of "what on earth did he just SAY?" doesn't help either. Not to mention that we're getting pretty solidly into medieval politics now!
* Seriously, chapter overviews. I was planning on one book a week, but this one's already taken well over a month.
* This chapter on "Pope Vs Emperor" is... *koff* Well, I was ABOUT to say it was giving a pretty good overview of the dilemmas and scuffles between the Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors in the early second millennium, including the big blow-up between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV. It was! Until, um, the account of Emperor Henry's three-day barefoot fast in sackcloth and ashes outsite the Pope's lodgings in the Alps - the fast which convinced Gregory he was truly sincere, and yes please un-excommunicate him and give him back his empire now. But according to Mr van Loon, Emperor Henry was "dressed as a penitent pilgrim (but with a warm sweater underneath his monkish garb)" when he made his penance there.
* I feel like I ought to be a Srs Bsnss Blog and not, say, jump up and down singing LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE every time a revered, still-in-print, Newbery-winning author does something this egregious. But it might be more fun! ;D
* Hi, Barbarossa! Man, we're going fast. Hi, St Louis! I gather we're doing more of a topical than a temporal arrangement of things.
* He does do the best chapter-end transitions, though. "Church and State fought each other and a third party - the medieval city - ran away with the spoils." I wish I could learn to do conclusions like him.
* Crusade tiems!
* Well, he does cover Peter the Hermit's Crusade and the Children's Crusade (two badly-planned pieces of religious enthusiasm that got a lot of people killed or enslaved). And he makes a distinction between the original Arabic conquerors of the Holy Land, who allowed pilgrimages and so forth, and the Seljuk Turks who conquered them in the early 1000s, which is more than you'll get from a lot of "children's history" writers I've read. ;P
* More map! Not a very good one - it's reaching too hard for the woodcut-style to be actually legible.
* Ooh, the rest of this chapter is pretty much an overview of how the Crusaders wound up bringing back things from Islamic civilization and starting to precipitate the Renaissance.
* And now we have a chapter of which the first three pages are entirely composed of What People Thought And Felt In The Middle Ages... you will forgive me for giving up on this wall-o-text at the beginning of the second paragraph, where I learn that the pre-1250 European "pioneers" were "too busy to play the fiddle or write pieces of poetry". ARGH ARGH SERIOUSLY ARGH WHY ARE YOU SO THICKHEADED, MR VAN LOON? *retreats muttering about Beowulf* *and King Arthur* *and Robin Hood* *ET SERIOUSLY CETERA* *that was me not cursing ;P*
* He is now explaining that really, seriously, despite the Great War being just over (apparently people were ranting about that proving that The World Does Not Change), there has been Progress in the last six hundred years! And it happened because of Cities! Now I will find out why. ;-)
* Pre-industrial Revolution! I'd really like to know how much of all this is true, about the Crusades causing everybody to want more and better stuffses now that they know different ways of living, and how that started the guilds etc going. It isn't something I think I can google, sadly.
* Ooh, FASCINATING. If this is true - he's suggesting that moneylending, and specifically, lending money to lords who didn't usually need it at home when their own castle grounds supplied all their wants but who DID need it to go crusading, was one way that the merchants and freemen got charters of various rights from the feudal lords. Asking for written permission to fish in this river or hunt in that forest, in return for hard cash. I am REALLY CURIOUS now, but he doesn't have a good record; I suspect the truth is both a lot more interesting and a whole lot harder to find out. o_O
* Hee, and now they're getting a city council, and fortifications, and strongrooms to keep the charters in so the lord won't throw a fit and take them away again... I REALLY wonder. I wish someone would write an actual good history of everywhere! :P Why is it so hard to find one that isn't all about Here Is My Ideology, History Proves It?
* ...I nearly started liveblogging the Complete Sherlock Holmes I had open, instead of The Story of White People (which I pushed aside to put it down). SADLY, NO. *g*
* We have here a chapter upon Medieval Self-Government. It is SO TIRING for me to not just devour this whole with "I did not know that! and that! and that!" I wish it was reliably accurate. For instance: here is a claim that the first meeting of Parliament's House of Commons was meant to discuss only taxation and financial matters, and to have no input on the general affairs of state. I'm just so tired from researching all this stuff that I'm not even googling that, but I wish I had the energy to research ALL THE THINGS. ;-)
* It does seem to be a pretty interesting overview of which-all countries established forms of self-government and when! With mention of the Althing and the Cortes and the Etats-Générals (did I spell that right?) and the Swiss cantons (yay William Tell *koff* I might be part Swiss too), and other things I haven't heard of like the Daneholf and the Riksdag.
* Ohoho is THAT what's up. Apparently Holland / the Low Countries had representatives of the commons in their councils as of the 1200s, and in the 1500s some of the said commons kicked out the king, the nobles, the clergy, and established the Republic of the United Seven Netherlands. Mr van Loon is justly proud of this! And he gives it another beautiful chapter-conclusion: "The city had become supreme and the good burghers had become the rulers of the land." Oh, I should have seen that coming earlier; "burghers", like "citizens", literally means "people of the city". No wonder he's leaning so heavily on the city being Important.
* Mmm, this is a BEAUTIFUL sketch of "The Medieval World" with its flat earth and arched sky. The back of the book tells me Hendrik van Loon is also known for a book entirely about art history; I suspect he cared more about that one. ;P
* New chapter, "What the People of the Middle Ages Thought of the World In Which They Happened to Live". This one starts with some glorious snark about the dangers of too-precise dates for historical eras: "I do not mean that on the 31st of December of the year 476, suddenly all the people of Europe said, 'Ah, now the Roman Empire has come to an end and we are living in the Middle Ages. How interesting!'" :D
* Heh, he talks about how some people at the court of Charlemagne were still entirely Roman in their habits and outlook, then adds, "when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world have never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man." A+ SNARK, SIR. (I'm assuming, because I'm pretty sure the disdainful "I'm not going to go into detail around kids" tone indicates it, that he's talking about people living in "civilized" countries who he thinks ought to know better, and not referring to quote-unquote "savages" straight out.)
* ...or maybe not? :P Seriously, sir. - I've skipped two pages that are all about how medieval people felt about Death, the hereafter, and their place in the present life. This line, though, deserves quoting (for a given value of "deserves"): "They were really barbarians who posed as civilised people. Charlemagne and Otto the Great... had as little resemblance to a real Roman Emperor... as "King" Wumba Wumba of the Upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of Sweden or Denmark." (bolding mine, quote marks in the bolding ORIGINAL :P)
Stop it right now, sir. I think I forgot to mention, in the typing-up, the map of the march of civilization that centered on Mesopotamia and left the whole of Africa black with simply the notation "Negroes", but that was one strike. This is another one. I don't have to read past a third. Phbbbbbbbtttt. :P
* "Why the Christian church should have been willing to accord such high honors [i.e. teaching and revering his works] to the teacher of Alexander the Great [i.e. Aristotle], whereas they condemned all other Greek philosophers on account of their heathenish doctrines, I really do not know." Aw, come on, bubbles. ;-) You may not know why, but I do: it's because St Thomas Aquinas fought to have Aristotle's works accepted as having nothing heretical in them. He did a darn good job, too.
I keep running into people lately who are all "bah, Aristotle, Aristotle, we never did any good until we got away from that old goof and started looking at the world for ourselves"... but HARRUMPH. Allow me to note that if Aristotle had never been accepted as Okay For Good Christians To Study, it's pretty likely none of the other Greek and Roman philosophers would have followed him into European circulation, et voila! No Renaissance. And let me further note, because I happen to know it and it's fun, that the first Christian scientist of the Middle Ages to do the "look at the natural world and describe it in detail" thing was Aquinas's TEACHER, Albert the Great.
(Incidentally, iirc Albert's description of the layers of an apple from core to skin has never been improved upon without artificial magnification. For instance.)
* Van Loon is straight-up asserting that Albertus Magnus DIDN'T study nature. Oh good grief. :PPPPP I have ceased to like you, sir. Roger Bacon was definitely not the first person to be interested in the insides of fishes! If I had my old books handy I could definitely tell you exactly what Albertus did in studying fish that made my family call my little sister "Albert" whenever she spent more time at the dinner table dissecting her filleted fish than she did eating it.
* The overview sections are really pretty good! He's trying hard to be even-handed and so forth. He's just... really bad at it! :P
* Ooh. Bustling medieval trade centres! With a map of the Hanseatic League! I do like how much more Eurocentric he is compared to the usual Brit-centric view of European history we get here in the US, at least.
* I'm becoming reluctant even to say "this bit seems fairly accurate", because he always seems to blow me out of the water, but this does seem to be an okay overview of how the Italian city-states became the centers of trade with the East after the Crusades, when silk and spices and so forth grew in economic importance. (Good grief, he's doing things to my syntax; I find myself wanting to say something about "our first halting steps toward a world economy". XD)
* I've never heard of the Venetian Council of Ten before! Mr van Loon claims this Council "maintained themselves with the help of a highly organized system of secret-service men and professional murderers", and describes them as a "high-handed and unscrupulous Committee of Public Safety"... the first quote of which sounds, well, credible for medieval/Renaissance Italy, but the second one sounds very, very much like standard Hendrik Van Loon Is Telling Tarradiddles. o_O I do not have time or energy to research Venetian politics from 1310 to 1797! That's FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, close enough.
* Over in Florence (a "democracy of very turbulent habits" - I'll accept the "turbulent" part, anyway, from half-remembered readings on the life of Dante Alighieri), we introduce the Medici family! Hello Medici! *waves* I wonder if it's really true that the three-balls symbol for a pawnshop comes from the Medici coat of arms?
* Oh, golly mackerel. The Fugger family, apparently German merchant bankers who also owned mines and were pretty heavily involved with every enterprise in Europe during their heyday - I'd never heard of them before, either - are introduced and dismissed in one parenthetical clause about how they "prospered greatly by shaving the coins with which they paid their workmen". This may be true! I don't know! Certainly coin-clipping is known from as early as the Robin Hood ballads (that's off the top of my head, it may well be earlier), and milled-edge coins didn't enter circulation until the 1560s according to an uncited Wiki article... but if you're going to say only one thing about a historical group, it doesn't seem to me that "They clipped coins!" is the most important choice when they also REPLACED THE MEDICI as an economic power, pressured the Pope to lift regulations against usury / charging interest, and trafficked heavily in indulgences. That second one alone has shaped our entire economic system: without interest rates, there'd be no... I can't even! O_O There'd BE banks etc, but they'd all work totally differently to what we're used to. And the selling of indulgences helped to trigger the Reformation, which changed the whole social climate of Europe (and got a lot of people killed).
Huh. I got kind of excited about that. ;-)
* Oo-er. If I trusted him to be accurate this would be SUCH a fascinating book. Here's a detailed account of how the demand for pickled herring, an important fast-day food in the medieval Christian world, created an artificially large fishing fleet that during the off-season, when the herring were out in deep water and not being caught, turned into a trading fleet! He's certainly making me want to learn stuff about all the things he talks about; I just wish I could learn a bit more of it FROM HIM. ;P
* Oops, and here we go again. The "almighty guilds" in Bruges and Ghent "established a labour tyranny which completely ruined both the employers and the workmen". THIS IS ME NOT SWEARING. ;P Remove your... foot from your mouth, sir! Guilds, like the labor unions they preceded, may well have hit a point of being way too big and not having any net positive effect - but again, it is a matter of perspective. If the first thing you say about guilds is not "they were extremely important in protecting the rights of workers", YOU ARE WRONG. Sorry, I do get excitable about snotty upperclassmen. ;-)
* He does at least acknowledge that a proper history of medieval trade would take several volumes, and says he will give a further-reading bibliography at the end of the book. HE'D BETTER. :-)
* But now he's sounding off again about how terrible the Middle Ages were for free thought, and how (for reasons unstated) the cities were some sort of haven for "those brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow domain of the established order of things", and how - oh lol - commerce = prosperity = leisure = the arts = curiosity = sunlight = "this is a good world, we are glad that we live in it" = Renaissance tiem.
All of which may be true except possibly the sunlight metaphor, but... your tone, sir. Your tone. O_O
* I mean. I'm going to quote the first chapter head for the Renaissance in full, and then stop and post. "People Once More Dared To Be Happy Just Because They Were Alive. They Tried To Save The Remains Of The Older And More Agreeable Civilisation Of Rome And Greece And They Were So Proud Of Their Achievements That They Spoke Of A Renaissance Or Re-Birth Of Civilisation".
Wow.
* Seriously, chapter overviews. I was planning on one book a week, but this one's already taken well over a month.
* This chapter on "Pope Vs Emperor" is... *koff* Well, I was ABOUT to say it was giving a pretty good overview of the dilemmas and scuffles between the Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors in the early second millennium, including the big blow-up between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV. It was! Until, um, the account of Emperor Henry's three-day barefoot fast in sackcloth and ashes outsite the Pope's lodgings in the Alps - the fast which convinced Gregory he was truly sincere, and yes please un-excommunicate him and give him back his empire now. But according to Mr van Loon, Emperor Henry was "dressed as a penitent pilgrim (but with a warm sweater underneath his monkish garb)" when he made his penance there.
* I feel like I ought to be a Srs Bsnss Blog and not, say, jump up and down singing LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE every time a revered, still-in-print, Newbery-winning author does something this egregious. But it might be more fun! ;D
* Hi, Barbarossa! Man, we're going fast. Hi, St Louis! I gather we're doing more of a topical than a temporal arrangement of things.
* He does do the best chapter-end transitions, though. "Church and State fought each other and a third party - the medieval city - ran away with the spoils." I wish I could learn to do conclusions like him.
* Crusade tiems!
* Well, he does cover Peter the Hermit's Crusade and the Children's Crusade (two badly-planned pieces of religious enthusiasm that got a lot of people killed or enslaved). And he makes a distinction between the original Arabic conquerors of the Holy Land, who allowed pilgrimages and so forth, and the Seljuk Turks who conquered them in the early 1000s, which is more than you'll get from a lot of "children's history" writers I've read. ;P
* More map! Not a very good one - it's reaching too hard for the woodcut-style to be actually legible.
* Ooh, the rest of this chapter is pretty much an overview of how the Crusaders wound up bringing back things from Islamic civilization and starting to precipitate the Renaissance.
* And now we have a chapter of which the first three pages are entirely composed of What People Thought And Felt In The Middle Ages... you will forgive me for giving up on this wall-o-text at the beginning of the second paragraph, where I learn that the pre-1250 European "pioneers" were "too busy to play the fiddle or write pieces of poetry". ARGH ARGH SERIOUSLY ARGH WHY ARE YOU SO THICKHEADED, MR VAN LOON? *retreats muttering about Beowulf* *and King Arthur* *and Robin Hood* *ET SERIOUSLY CETERA* *that was me not cursing ;P*
* He is now explaining that really, seriously, despite the Great War being just over (apparently people were ranting about that proving that The World Does Not Change), there has been Progress in the last six hundred years! And it happened because of Cities! Now I will find out why. ;-)
* Pre-industrial Revolution! I'd really like to know how much of all this is true, about the Crusades causing everybody to want more and better stuffses now that they know different ways of living, and how that started the guilds etc going. It isn't something I think I can google, sadly.
* Ooh, FASCINATING. If this is true - he's suggesting that moneylending, and specifically, lending money to lords who didn't usually need it at home when their own castle grounds supplied all their wants but who DID need it to go crusading, was one way that the merchants and freemen got charters of various rights from the feudal lords. Asking for written permission to fish in this river or hunt in that forest, in return for hard cash. I am REALLY CURIOUS now, but he doesn't have a good record; I suspect the truth is both a lot more interesting and a whole lot harder to find out. o_O
* Hee, and now they're getting a city council, and fortifications, and strongrooms to keep the charters in so the lord won't throw a fit and take them away again... I REALLY wonder. I wish someone would write an actual good history of everywhere! :P Why is it so hard to find one that isn't all about Here Is My Ideology, History Proves It?
* ...I nearly started liveblogging the Complete Sherlock Holmes I had open, instead of The Story of White People (which I pushed aside to put it down). SADLY, NO. *g*
* We have here a chapter upon Medieval Self-Government. It is SO TIRING for me to not just devour this whole with "I did not know that! and that! and that!" I wish it was reliably accurate. For instance: here is a claim that the first meeting of Parliament's House of Commons was meant to discuss only taxation and financial matters, and to have no input on the general affairs of state. I'm just so tired from researching all this stuff that I'm not even googling that, but I wish I had the energy to research ALL THE THINGS. ;-)
* It does seem to be a pretty interesting overview of which-all countries established forms of self-government and when! With mention of the Althing and the Cortes and the Etats-Générals (did I spell that right?) and the Swiss cantons (yay William Tell *koff* I might be part Swiss too), and other things I haven't heard of like the Daneholf and the Riksdag.
* Ohoho is THAT what's up. Apparently Holland / the Low Countries had representatives of the commons in their councils as of the 1200s, and in the 1500s some of the said commons kicked out the king, the nobles, the clergy, and established the Republic of the United Seven Netherlands. Mr van Loon is justly proud of this! And he gives it another beautiful chapter-conclusion: "The city had become supreme and the good burghers had become the rulers of the land." Oh, I should have seen that coming earlier; "burghers", like "citizens", literally means "people of the city". No wonder he's leaning so heavily on the city being Important.
* Mmm, this is a BEAUTIFUL sketch of "The Medieval World" with its flat earth and arched sky. The back of the book tells me Hendrik van Loon is also known for a book entirely about art history; I suspect he cared more about that one. ;P
* New chapter, "What the People of the Middle Ages Thought of the World In Which They Happened to Live". This one starts with some glorious snark about the dangers of too-precise dates for historical eras: "I do not mean that on the 31st of December of the year 476, suddenly all the people of Europe said, 'Ah, now the Roman Empire has come to an end and we are living in the Middle Ages. How interesting!'" :D
* Heh, he talks about how some people at the court of Charlemagne were still entirely Roman in their habits and outlook, then adds, "when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world have never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man." A+ SNARK, SIR. (I'm assuming, because I'm pretty sure the disdainful "I'm not going to go into detail around kids" tone indicates it, that he's talking about people living in "civilized" countries who he thinks ought to know better, and not referring to quote-unquote "savages" straight out.)
* ...or maybe not? :P Seriously, sir. - I've skipped two pages that are all about how medieval people felt about Death, the hereafter, and their place in the present life. This line, though, deserves quoting (for a given value of "deserves"): "They were really barbarians who posed as civilised people. Charlemagne and Otto the Great... had as little resemblance to a real Roman Emperor... as "King" Wumba Wumba of the Upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of Sweden or Denmark." (bolding mine, quote marks in the bolding ORIGINAL :P)
Stop it right now, sir. I think I forgot to mention, in the typing-up, the map of the march of civilization that centered on Mesopotamia and left the whole of Africa black with simply the notation "Negroes", but that was one strike. This is another one. I don't have to read past a third. Phbbbbbbbtttt. :P
* "Why the Christian church should have been willing to accord such high honors [i.e. teaching and revering his works] to the teacher of Alexander the Great [i.e. Aristotle], whereas they condemned all other Greek philosophers on account of their heathenish doctrines, I really do not know." Aw, come on, bubbles. ;-) You may not know why, but I do: it's because St Thomas Aquinas fought to have Aristotle's works accepted as having nothing heretical in them. He did a darn good job, too.
I keep running into people lately who are all "bah, Aristotle, Aristotle, we never did any good until we got away from that old goof and started looking at the world for ourselves"... but HARRUMPH. Allow me to note that if Aristotle had never been accepted as Okay For Good Christians To Study, it's pretty likely none of the other Greek and Roman philosophers would have followed him into European circulation, et voila! No Renaissance. And let me further note, because I happen to know it and it's fun, that the first Christian scientist of the Middle Ages to do the "look at the natural world and describe it in detail" thing was Aquinas's TEACHER, Albert the Great.
(Incidentally, iirc Albert's description of the layers of an apple from core to skin has never been improved upon without artificial magnification. For instance.)
* Van Loon is straight-up asserting that Albertus Magnus DIDN'T study nature. Oh good grief. :PPPPP I have ceased to like you, sir. Roger Bacon was definitely not the first person to be interested in the insides of fishes! If I had my old books handy I could definitely tell you exactly what Albertus did in studying fish that made my family call my little sister "Albert" whenever she spent more time at the dinner table dissecting her filleted fish than she did eating it.
* The overview sections are really pretty good! He's trying hard to be even-handed and so forth. He's just... really bad at it! :P
* Ooh. Bustling medieval trade centres! With a map of the Hanseatic League! I do like how much more Eurocentric he is compared to the usual Brit-centric view of European history we get here in the US, at least.
* I'm becoming reluctant even to say "this bit seems fairly accurate", because he always seems to blow me out of the water, but this does seem to be an okay overview of how the Italian city-states became the centers of trade with the East after the Crusades, when silk and spices and so forth grew in economic importance. (Good grief, he's doing things to my syntax; I find myself wanting to say something about "our first halting steps toward a world economy". XD)
* I've never heard of the Venetian Council of Ten before! Mr van Loon claims this Council "maintained themselves with the help of a highly organized system of secret-service men and professional murderers", and describes them as a "high-handed and unscrupulous Committee of Public Safety"... the first quote of which sounds, well, credible for medieval/Renaissance Italy, but the second one sounds very, very much like standard Hendrik Van Loon Is Telling Tarradiddles. o_O I do not have time or energy to research Venetian politics from 1310 to 1797! That's FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, close enough.
* Over in Florence (a "democracy of very turbulent habits" - I'll accept the "turbulent" part, anyway, from half-remembered readings on the life of Dante Alighieri), we introduce the Medici family! Hello Medici! *waves* I wonder if it's really true that the three-balls symbol for a pawnshop comes from the Medici coat of arms?
* Oh, golly mackerel. The Fugger family, apparently German merchant bankers who also owned mines and were pretty heavily involved with every enterprise in Europe during their heyday - I'd never heard of them before, either - are introduced and dismissed in one parenthetical clause about how they "prospered greatly by shaving the coins with which they paid their workmen". This may be true! I don't know! Certainly coin-clipping is known from as early as the Robin Hood ballads (that's off the top of my head, it may well be earlier), and milled-edge coins didn't enter circulation until the 1560s according to an uncited Wiki article... but if you're going to say only one thing about a historical group, it doesn't seem to me that "They clipped coins!" is the most important choice when they also REPLACED THE MEDICI as an economic power, pressured the Pope to lift regulations against usury / charging interest, and trafficked heavily in indulgences. That second one alone has shaped our entire economic system: without interest rates, there'd be no... I can't even! O_O There'd BE banks etc, but they'd all work totally differently to what we're used to. And the selling of indulgences helped to trigger the Reformation, which changed the whole social climate of Europe (and got a lot of people killed).
Huh. I got kind of excited about that. ;-)
* Oo-er. If I trusted him to be accurate this would be SUCH a fascinating book. Here's a detailed account of how the demand for pickled herring, an important fast-day food in the medieval Christian world, created an artificially large fishing fleet that during the off-season, when the herring were out in deep water and not being caught, turned into a trading fleet! He's certainly making me want to learn stuff about all the things he talks about; I just wish I could learn a bit more of it FROM HIM. ;P
* Oops, and here we go again. The "almighty guilds" in Bruges and Ghent "established a labour tyranny which completely ruined both the employers and the workmen". THIS IS ME NOT SWEARING. ;P Remove your... foot from your mouth, sir! Guilds, like the labor unions they preceded, may well have hit a point of being way too big and not having any net positive effect - but again, it is a matter of perspective. If the first thing you say about guilds is not "they were extremely important in protecting the rights of workers", YOU ARE WRONG. Sorry, I do get excitable about snotty upperclassmen. ;-)
* He does at least acknowledge that a proper history of medieval trade would take several volumes, and says he will give a further-reading bibliography at the end of the book. HE'D BETTER. :-)
* But now he's sounding off again about how terrible the Middle Ages were for free thought, and how (for reasons unstated) the cities were some sort of haven for "those brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow domain of the established order of things", and how - oh lol - commerce = prosperity = leisure = the arts = curiosity = sunlight = "this is a good world, we are glad that we live in it" = Renaissance tiem.
All of which may be true except possibly the sunlight metaphor, but... your tone, sir. Your tone. O_O
* I mean. I'm going to quote the first chapter head for the Renaissance in full, and then stop and post. "People Once More Dared To Be Happy Just Because They Were Alive. They Tried To Save The Remains Of The Older And More Agreeable Civilisation Of Rome And Greece And They Were So Proud Of Their Achievements That They Spoke Of A Renaissance Or Re-Birth Of Civilisation".
Wow.