a procession of flagellants at tournai in flanders in 1349,...

A procession of flagellants at Tournai in Flanders in 1349, marching with the crucified Christ and scourging themselves in imitation of his suffering.© ARPL/HIP/The Image Works

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Map 9–1 SPREAD OF THE BLACK DEATH Apparently introduced by seaborne rats from Black Sea areas where plague-infested rodents had long been known, the Black Death brought huge human, social, and economic consequences. One of the lower estimates of Europeans dying is 25 million. The map charts the plague�s spread in the mid-fourteenth century. Generally following trade routes, the plague reached Scandinavia by 1350, and some believe it then went on to Iceland and even Greenland. Areas off the main trade routes were largely spared.

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The Prince of the World, a sandstone sculpture, vividly portrays the transitory nature of life. When viewers look behind the attractive young prince, they discover his beauty to be only skin deep. His body, like every human body, is filled with death, here symbolized by worms and flesh-eating frogs. A serpent spirals up his left leg and enters his back, an allusion to the biblical teaching that the wages of sin are death.Stadt Nürnberg

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This illustration from the Canon of Medicine by the Persian physician and philosopher Avicenna (980–1037), whose Arabic name was Ibn Sina, shows him visiting the homes of rich patients. In the High Middle Ages, the Canon of Medicine was the standard medical textbook in the Middle East and Europe.Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, Italy. Scala/Art Resource, NY

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Edward III pays homage to his feudal lord Philip VI of France. Legally, Edward was a vassal of the king of France.Archives Snark International/Art Resource, NY

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Map 9–2 THE HUNDRED YEARS�WAR The Hundred Years�War went on intermittently from the late 1330s until 1453. These maps show the remarkable English territorial gains up to the sudden and decisive turning of the tide of battle in favorof the French by the forces of Joan of Arc in 1429.

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A portrayal of John Huss as he was led to the stake at Constance. After his execution, his bones and ashes were scattered in the Rhine River to prevent his followers from claiming them as relics. This pen-and-ink drawing is from Ulrich von Richenthal�s Chronicle of the Council of Constance (ca. 1450).CORBIS/Bettmann

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Justice in the late Middle Ages. Depicted are the most common forms of corporal and capital punishment in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At top: burning, hanging, drowning. At center: blinding, quartering, the wheel, cutting of hair (a mark of great shame for a freeman). At bottom: thrashing, decapitation, amputation of hand (for thieves).Herzog August Bibliothek

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The Renaissance celebrated human beauty and dignity. Here the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden (1400–1464) portrays an ordinary woman more perfectly on canvas than she could ever have appeared in life.Rogier van der Weyden (Netherlandish, 1399.1400–1464), �Portrait of a Lady.� 1460. .370 � .270 (14 � 10 ); framed: .609 � .533 � .114 (24 � 21 � 4 ). Photo: Bob Grove. Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Photograph © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Map 10–1 RENAISSANCE ITALY The city-states of Renaissance Italy were self-contained principalities whose internal strife was monitored by their despots and whose external aggression was long successfully controlled by treaty.

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Florentine women doing needlework, spinning, and weaving. These activities took up much of a woman�s time and contributed to the elegance of dress for which Florentine men and women were famed.Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara. Alinari/Art Resource, NY

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A wealthy man oversees apple-picking at harvest time in a fifteenth-century French orchard. In the town below, individual house gardens can be seen. Protective fences, made of woven sticks, keep out predatory animals. In the right foreground, a boar can be seen overturning an apple barrel.The British Library

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Christine de Pisan, who has the modern reputation of being the first European feminist, presents her internationally famous book, �The Treasure of the City of Ladies,� also known as �The Book of Three Virtues,� to Isabella of Bavaria amid her ladies in waiting. Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS/Bettmann

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Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Self-portrait at Age 28 with Fur Coat.1500. Oil on wood, 67 � 49 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Photograph © Scala/Art Resource, NY

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Albrecht Dürer. Melencolia I.

1514. Engraving. 23.8 �— 18.9 cm. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Combining the painterly qualities of all the Renaissance masters, Raphael created scenes of tender beauty and subjects sublime in both flesh and spirit.Musee du Louvre, Paris/Giraudon, Paris/SuperStock

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Leonardo Plots the Perfect Man Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490. The name �Vitruvian� is taken from that of a first-century C.E. Roman architect and engineer, Marcus Pollio Vitruvius, who used squares and circles todemonstrate the human body�s symmetry and proportionality.CORBIS/Bettmann

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Michelangelo�s Scene from the Last Judgment. The High Italian Renaissance obsession with the beefy, pumped up, heroic body finds expression in this detail of a fresco in Michelangelo�s rendering of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

Nippon Television Network Corporation

The printing press made possible the diffusion of Renaissance learning, but no book stimulated thought more at this time than did the Bible. With Gutenberg�s publication of a printed Bible in 1454, scholars gained access to a dependable, standardized text, so Scripture could be discussed and debated as never before.This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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A Saint at Peace in the Grasp of Temptation Martin Schongauer (c. 1430–1491), the best engraver in the Upper Rhine, portrays the devil�s temptation of St. Anthony in the wilderness as a robust physical attack by demons rather than the traditional melancholic introspection.National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

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A contemporary caricature depicts John Tetzel, the famous indulgence preacher. The last lines of the jingle read, �As soon as gold in the basin rings, right then the soul to Heaven springs.� It was Tetzel�s preaching that spurred Luther to publish his ninety-five theses.Courtesy Stiftung Luthergedenkstaten in Sachsen-Anhalt/Lutherhalle, Wittenberg

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In 1520, Luther�s first portrait, shown here, depicted him as a tough, steely-eyed monk. Afraid that this portrayal might convey defiance rather than reform to Emperor Charles V, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Luther�s protector, ordered court painter Lucas Cranach to soften the image. The result was a Luther placed within a traditional monk�s niche reading an open Bible, a reformer, unlike the one depicted here, who was prepared to listen as well as to instruct.Martin Luther as a monk, 1521. © Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY

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Map 11–1 THE EMPIRE OF CHARLES I Dynastic marriages and simple chance concentrated into Charles�s hands rule over the lands shown here, plus Spain�s overseas possessions. Crowns and titles rained down on him; his election in 1519 as emperor gave him new distractions and responsibilities.

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The punishment of a peasant leader in a village near Heilbronn. After the defeat of rebellious peasants in and around the city of Heilbronn, Jacob Rorbach, a well-to-do peasant leader from a nearby village, was tied to a stake and slowly roasted to death.Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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Memorial to the Peasants Revolt. Source: Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in Renaissance Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 235. The caption reads: �He who wants to commemorate his victory over the rebellious peasants might use to that end a structure such as I portray here.�

Illustration from Jane Campbell Hutchinson, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1990)

A Catholic Portrayal of Martin Luther Tempting Christ (1547). Reformation propaganda often portrayed the pope as the Antichrist or the devil. Here Catholic propaganda turns the tables on the Protestant reformers by portraying a figure of Martin Luther as the devil (note the monstrous feet and tail under his academic robes). Recreating the biblical scene of Christ being tempted by the devil in the wilderness, the figure of Luther asks Christ to transform stone into bread, to which temptation Christ responds by saying that humans do not live by bread alone.Versucung Christi, 1547, Gemälde, Bonn, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Inv. Nr. 58.3

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Map 11–2 THE SWISS CONFEDERATION Although nominally still a part of the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland grew from a loose defensive union of the central �forest cantons� in the thirteenth century into a fiercely independent association of regions with different languages, histories, and, finally, religions.

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A portrait of the young John Calvin.

Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Geneva

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Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) was the most famous portrait painter of the Reformation. Here he portrays a seemingly almighty Henry VIII.© Scala / Art Resource

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Map 11–3 THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION ABOUT 1560 By 1560, Luther, Zwingli, and Loyola were dead, Calvin was near the end of his life, the English break from Rome was complete, and the last session of the Council of Trent was about to assemble. This map shows �religious geography� of western Europe at the time.

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Brothers and Sisters. While away from home at law school in Padua, Italy, nineteen-year-old Paul Behaim, Jr., wrote in July 1577 to his older sisters Magdalena (twenty-two) and Sabina (twenty-one) to complain about the infrequency of their writing to him. Typical of sibling relations in every age, the letter is affectionate and joking. The sisters were then at home with their widowed mother and busy with the many chores of the self-sufficient sixteenth-century domestic household—especially, at this time of the year, gardening. Because of their alleged neglect Paul teasingly tells them they must now do �penance� by making him two new shirts, as his were embarrassingly tattered. He indicated in the left margin the exact collar length (A) and style (B) he wishes the shirts to be. Sewing for the household was another regular domestic chore for burgher and patrician women not working in trades outside the home. But Magdalena and Sabina went even further to �cover� their brother: They also allowed him to receive income (to be repaid in the future) from their own paternal inheritances so he might finish his legal education, on the successful completion of which the whole family depended for its future success.German National Museum, Nuremberg, Germany, Behaim-Archiv Fasz, 106

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A Family Meal.

In Max Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcuts, III: 1500–1550, rev. and ed. by W. L. Strauss (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1974)

a procession of flagellants at tournai in flanders in 1349,...

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