Gothic Period: Culture, Science, Economy, and Architecture

Cultural Environment of the Gothic Period

Historians generally define the periodization of Western European history during the Middle Ages into three eras: the Early Middle Ages (5th–11th centuries AD); the High Middle Ages (1000–1300 AD); and the Late Middle Ages (1300–1500). Construction of the great Gothic cathedrals began during the High Middle Ages, an era that experienced a "dramatic re-emergence of urban life and an increasing sophistication in secular culture" (Singman xi). Major events of the High Middle Ages include the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the conflict between popes and emperors for political control of Europe, and the Crusades. Indeed, the very idea of Europe during the Middle Ages was grounded in conflict between Christendom and Islam, although no unity existed between the Latin Christians of the West and the Greek Orthodox Christians of the East (Delanty 17).

In the Late Middle Ages, the Little Ice Age, the Great Famine, and the Black Death wiped out 40–50% of the population — and perhaps more in some areas. The invention of gunpowder and firearms reduced the influence of knights and the code of chivalry, while social, religious, and political crises such as the peasant revolts, the Great Schism, and the Babylonian Captivity challenged the power of the nobility and the Catholic Church. Historians have studied the Late Middle Ages far more thoroughly than earlier periods, partly because more sources are available, though no overall paradigm exists that "integrates the multiple facets of culture and society of western Europe" (Cantor 563). By 1500, the Reformation, the printing press, and the beginning of colonization in Asia, Africa, and the Americas ushered in the end of the Middle Ages.

Medieval society was characterized by the absence of a centralized state and by the political and economic power of the landed aristocracy, which also controlled the military. This feudal system rested on "personal relationships like kingship and patronage" rather than abstract institutions such as bureaucracies and corporations (Singman 1). High nobles in 13th-century England with an income of £5,000 per year earned five hundred times more than the poor, and even though landless knights existed, there remained a tremendous gulf between commoners and the elite. Aristocrats comprised roughly 1% of the population in Western Europe, "but their power and influence were far greater than their actual numbers" (Singman 4). Wealthy capitalists and the bourgeoisie began to emerge in the Late Middle Ages, and the labor shortage caused by the Black Death undermined serfdom, creating a class of wealthy peasant farmers, gentry, and lower bourgeoisie. In spite of this — and despite the peasant and artisan rebellions of the 14th and 15th centuries — the aristocracy remained in control. Even during the Italian Renaissance, "the great merchant families modelled the political behaviour of the northern grandees" (Cantor 564).

Gothic art and architecture evolved out of the Romanesque style in the early thirteenth century. This development began in France and spread throughout Europe, centering on Northern and Western Europe. Many European cathedrals and abbeys are Gothic, but the architectural approach is also evident in universities, castles, guild halls, town halls, and palaces. Gothic provided a natural stylistic transition from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, and its popularity lasted into the fifteenth century (Charles).

Relationship to Previous Periods and Contributions to Western Civilization

The transition from Romanesque to Gothic was not marked by an unambiguous event or sudden change; rather, it was a gradual progression. Gothic figures slowly became more animated and precise in their relationship to backgrounds or scenery. As with the Romanesque, Gothic art maintained the predominance of religious subject matter in its sculptural, painted, and glass expressions. In architecture, the Gothic style continued the Romanesque challenge of building ever larger cathedrals (Gothic Art). Its emphasis, however, was different. The Gothic period was typified by "vast space and lots of light to create an impression of reverence" (Branner 327–33), in deliberate contrast to the dark, bulky, and gloomy Romanesque churches.

The Gothic style correlated with broader social and cultural changes throughout Europe. Its foundations lay in Christianity, and monumental Gothic art and sculpture served an educational function, narrating biblical stories. Yet it arose — as the Romanesque had — in a European environment of increased urbanization, the proliferation of the university system, and the facilitation of trade both within Europe and beyond. Europe was moving toward a capital-based economy, and increased literacy along with the establishment of a middle class that could afford to patronize art propelled Gothic into the mainstream (Cahill). Craftsmen and artists experienced a new level of public exposure.

The Gothic style shaped human perception in ways that are still felt today. It offered a different way of viewing the human condition. As Punter observes, in painting and sculpture — just as in literature and poetry — figures became more animated and lifelike, more realistically aligned to their backgrounds, and free from the exaggerations of previous ages. The use of light and shadow to define subjects in art, and the use of subtlety of character in literature, gave the Gothic artist a more humanistic palette — a legacy that helped ease the transition from an overt focus on religiosity toward a more secular approach to human culture (Punter). Beyond this, the notion that an average household could use art such as woodcuts to decorate its home represented an important movement away from feudal drudgery and toward a more humanistic appreciation of life (Lilley).

Scientific Environment

Only in the West did science become institutionalized in universities during the Middle Ages — a development that never occurred in China or in any of the Islamic societies. Many historians of science have regarded the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries as a radical break with medieval natural philosophy. After all, Galileo denounced Scholasticism and the physics of Aristotle as "the enemy of the new science" (Grant 168). Nevertheless, medieval scholars laid the foundations for modern science through the translation of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin and through their attempts to reconcile the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle with Christianity. The new universities founded in Paris, Oxford, Padua, and Bologna after 1200 were "different from anything the world had ever seen" (Grant 172). Their curricula were derived from Greek and Arabic documents and remained in place for the next five hundred years. Natural philosophy was at the core of the medieval curriculum and was not only accepted by the Catholic Church but became accepted orthodoxy widely disseminated throughout Western Europe. Even though the new Renaissance science emerged mostly outside the older universities, those "venerable institutions had already done their foundational work" (Grant 173). By 1300, "the most advanced ancient thought had already been discovered and translated," including algebra, geometry, and arithmetic, and some natural philosophers had already begun to move beyond Aristotle, entertaining ideas about gravity, inertia, momentum, and a mechanical or clockwork universe (Hannam 177).

Theologians and natural philosophers often attempted to combine their two disciplines when discussing the origins of the universe or the proofs of God's existence, yet they "rarely allowed theology to hinder their inquiries into the physical world" (Grant 174). Among the most prominent were Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, John Pecham, and Nicholas Oresme. William of Conches attempted to reconcile Christianity with Plato's natural philosophy by refuting the notion that the Bible should be interpreted literally. Like other natural philosophers, he posited a physical universe created and set in motion by God that also followed certain predictable natural laws (Hannam 53). In this way, natural philosophy became the basis for modern science in the West — a discipline that was still called natural philosophy as late as the 19th century. In exact sciences such as astronomy and optics, medieval natural philosophy made few advances in its own right, but it did translate all the important ancient texts into Latin, providing a foundation upon which later scientists would build and surpass (Grant 192).

Christian natural philosophers at the end of the Middle Ages were engaged in a search for the natural causes of events, rather than relying on explanations that invoked supernatural intervention. The fourteenth-century Catholic natural philosopher Nicole Oresme, for example, discussed natural wonders by declaring that "there is no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God as if He would produce these effects directly, more so than those effects whose causes we believe are well-known to us" (Numbers 267).

The successive waves of plague that swept through Europe gravely affected the progress of knowledge. A third of Europe's population perished in 1348, including many towns that had been repositories of scientific information and innovation. Coupled with the plague were destructive famines and violent peasant uprisings, especially in Germany, that significantly distressed European society (Blickle). Given this sequence of calamities, it is little wonder that scientific development temporarily ground to a halt, not to be revived until the fifteenth century — the period known as the Renaissance.

William of Ockham formulated the principle of Occam's Razor, which held that the simplest theory consistent with all known facts was the correct one. At the University of Paris, Jean Buridan questioned the physics of Aristotle and presaged the modern scientific ideas of Isaac Newton and Galileo concerning gravity, inertia, and momentum when he wrote:

…after leaving the arm of the thrower, the projectile would be moved by an impetus given to it by the thrower and would continue to be moved as long as the impetus remained stronger than the resistance, and would be of infinite duration were it not diminished and corrupted by a contrary force resisting it or by something inclining it to a contrary motion. (Glick, Livesay, and Wallis 107)

Thomas Bradwardine and his colleagues at Oxford University also anticipated Newton and Galileo when they demonstrated that a body moving at constant velocity travels a distance in time equal to that of an accelerated body whose velocity is half the final speed of the accelerated body. Nicholas Oresme showed that Aristotle's physics was invalid in its description of the movement of the earth and the atmosphere, and argued that the earth rotated daily and revolved around the sun. Despite this argument in favor of the earth's motion, Oresme ultimately fell back on the commonly held view that "everyone maintains, and I think myself, that the heavens do move and not the earth" (Oresme 536–37).

The historian of science Ronald Numbers notes that the modern scientific assumption of methodological naturalism can be traced back to the work of these medieval thinkers. By the late Middle Ages, the search for natural causes had come to typify the work of Christian natural philosophers. Although they characteristically left open the possibility of direct divine intervention, they frequently expressed contempt for contemporaries who invoked miracles rather than searching for natural explanations. Jean Buridan, described as "perhaps the most brilliant arts master of the Middle Ages," contrasted the philosopher's search for "appropriate natural causes" with the common folk's erroneous habit of attributing unusual astronomical phenomena to the supernatural. Nicole Oresme similarly admonished that there was "no reason to take recourse to the heavens, the last refuge of the weak, or demons, or to our glorious God" for effects whose natural causes were already well understood (Numbers 267).

During the Late Middle Ages, however, Europe experienced famines, plagues, civil wars, and rebellions that wiped out as much as 40–50% of the population and set in motion the forces of modernity that would ultimately destroy the feudal system and the universal power of the Catholic Church. These forces — nationalism, capitalism, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of humanism and modern science — all had their precursors in the Middle Ages and were built on medieval foundations, even as they simultaneously broke with and rebelled against those foundations.