Change Was Not Slow

In my last posts (now some weeks past), I touched on ways Renaissance thought and behavior differed from our own. One habit of our minds is to see the past as homogenous, changing slowly, and constantly becoming more modern (what we used to mean by "progress" before we became disillusioned about it). It's an illusion born of our own lazy rationalizations. The idea that change was slow would have come as a shock to many people in many places in the past. To them the world could be wild and unpredictable.

Suppose you had been born in London in 1600 and lived to the ripe old age of one hundred. (There were a few centenarians around, though far fewer than today.) You would have lived through one change of dynasty, multiple civil wars, revolution, the beheading of one king, nearly a decade of military dictatorship, a major outbreak of plague, a fire that nearly destroyed your city, an invasion, and the overthrow of another king. You would have seen the birth of the modern British political system in the fights between Whigs and Tories (the latter still going very strong), the issuance of a Bill of Rights, and the balance of parliamentary and royal power.

Meanwhile, almost all of the English colonies in North America were founded, Boston became a major city, British interest in India began with the acquisition of Bombay, and there was an abortive attempt to gain and maintain a foothold in North Africa. Economically, you would have witnessed the birth of stock markets, the first modern economic bubble as tulip speculation ravaged the Dutch economy, and the creation of the Bank of England (along with modern methods of financing war and government debt). Militarily the entire way wars were fought changed on both land and sea, as guns and ships were improved, pikes were replaced by bayonets, sieges were reduced to an exact science, and jurists sought to impose order and restraint through generally accepted laws of war, to prevent a repetition of the horrors of wars in Germany and the Low Countries during the years of your middle age.

Technologically, there were practical experiments with submarines, vacuum pumps were invented (establishing that vacuums do exist and proving Aristotle and the Catholic Church wrong), and Galileo would discover the pendulum while others would put it to use to make more accurate clocks. With the telescope he would discover the moons of other planets and their imperfections (again refuting Aristotle). Hooke and Leeuwenhoek would discover miniscule worlds with the microscope. The scientific method would be formulated and societies created to promote it, Newton and Leibniz would lay out the rules for calculus, Kepler would do the same for planetary motion, and Newton would follow up with rules for motion and gravity.

All of that, plus the political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke, religious radicalism advocating pacifism and communism, visible climatic change (it got much colder and the Baltic repeatedly froze), and rapid changes in style and fashion might have begun to dominate your life. Nor must we forget the decline of witchcraft persecutions, having reached their climax in England in 1644-5 and New England in 1692 (though the last prosecution for witchcraft in England was in 1944).

It was hardly a boring time to be alive. The political change was as rapid as anything we have experienced. Social and intellectual change was almost as great. All of them experienced great swings of the pendulum. Can we really think that change was always slow and moving in only one direction?