Teacher Overview Objectives: European Culture and Politics ca. 1750

Objective Guiding Question and Activity Description

1. Examine events from the Middle Ages to the mid-1700s from multiple perspectives.

What was the political and cultural situation in Europea ca. 1750?

● perspective writing, secondary source reading

 

 

What was the political and cultural context in Europea ca. 1750?

Objective: Examine events from the Middle Ages to the mid-1700s from multiple perspectives.

Introduction: Directions: Below are six groups of people who had very different perspectives in history. Try to imagine yourself as a member of each group when answering the questions.

Questions What do you need to be satisfied?

What would make you unsatisfied?

What power do you have?

What power do you want?

Monarchs (Kings and queens)

Catholic Clergy (People who work for

the church like the Pope, bishops, and

priests)

Nobles (Wealthy landowners)

Merchants

Intellectuals (Artists, Philosophers,

Scientists)

Peasants (Farmers, workers, lower class people)

1 

 

Review Think-Pair-Share

Topic 1. Think Independently, write anything you can remember about the topic from the timeline above.

2. Pair Explain everything you wrote in the “Think” column to a partner then, ask them to do the same. Add new information from your partner below.

Middle Ages

Feudalism

Renaissance

Protestant Reformation

Age of Absolutism

Scientific Revolution

3. Share With your partner, select the three most important facts for your classmates to know about each topic, then share them with the class.

2 

 

To prepare for sharing out, circle those three facts.

Review Topic #1- The Middle Ages and Feudalism (476- 1500s) After the fall of Rome in 476 CE, Western Europe was in chaos. Without a centralized government, monarchs who ruled small kingdoms continuously fought wars against one another for more land and power. The Catholic Church became the unifying force and the feudal system (feudalism) brought order to each kingdom in Europe. The Catholic Church was the cultural, intellectual, and political center of Europe . Monarchs were crowned by the Pope, most art and music was about Christianity and paid for by the Church, and the church was the source of all knowledge. The Bible was printed only in Latin which only the educated clergy members could read, so everyone relied on their interpretation to learn what they were supposed to do and how to live their lives according to God.

Economically, Europe was isolated. Most people lived their whole lives on the manor (piece of land owned by a lord) because they could grow all of the food they needed there, the manor was self-sufficient. There was little trade between Western Europe and the rest of the world and as a result, there was a lack of new ideas and innovation.

Question

Monarchs (Kings and queens)

Catholic Clergy (People who work for the

church like the Pope, bishops, and priests)

Nobles (wealthy landowners)

Peasants (Farmers, workers, lower

class people)

3 

 

How did the Middle Ages affect

you?

Review Topic #2- The Renaissance: Trade and New Money Fuel a European Comeback

The Renaissance, “rebirth” in French, was a cultural movement in the 14th-17th centuries during which European artists, scientists, and scholars, were inspired by Classical achievements of the Greeks and Romans, which they became aware of through ruins and Greco-Roman texts preserved by Islamic scholars in the Ottoman Empire. The Renaissance started in Italy in the 14th century (1300s), then its ideas and cultural trends spread slowly across Europe. The Renaissance marked the end of the Middle Ages.

The end of the Middle Ages and start of the Renaissance occurred because of renewed trade connections and a great deal of wealth that was made off of that trade. The Crusades which took place during the Middle Ages, though destructive, connected Europeans with Islamic traders in the Middle East who had access to trade networks in Asia. As a result, Western European interest in the rest of the world grew.

Italy was the connection between Western Europe and Islamic Empires in the Middle East. After the Crusades, Italian cities like Venice made strong trade connections with the Ottoman Empire. Wealthy merchants, like the Medici family, turned their interest to beautifying cities like Florence. They funded artists, architects, and scientists to study Greek and Roman buildings and texts, then to build new Italian achievements. Without money from trade the achievements of the Renaissance would not have been created.

When the Black Death swept through Italy, a disease that spread through trade routes, it killed off a lot of the nobles. Merchants replaced the nobles as the wealthy people in Italy. The nobles held wealth in land, but the merchants made money through trade. Peasants also had new options since the nobles that controlled them under feudalism were no longer as strong and they could make money in businesses that made goods to trade.

Over the course of the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, the wealth and cultural trends in Italy spread throughout Europe inspiring achievements in the arts and science in the Netherlands, England, France, and elsewhere, bringing Europe out of the “Dark Ages” and into the Modern Era.

Question

Nobles (wealthy landowners)

Merchants

Intellectuals (Artists, Philosophers,

Scientists)

Peasants (Farmers, workers, lower

class people)

4 

 

How did the Renaissanc

e affect you?

Review Topic #3- The Protestant Reformation: A Challenge to the Church’s Authority

The Catholic Church’s Authority In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the cultural, intellectual, and political center of Europe. Monarchs were crowned by the Pope, most art and music was about Christianity and paid for by the Church, and the church was the source of all knowledge.

The Bible, which was the source of Catholic Church’s power and knowledge was only written in Latin, a language that very few people outside of the clergy (educated members of the church) could read, so priests interpreted the Bible for everyone else and told them what it said they should do and how they should act.

The Protestant Reformation Questions the Catholic Church

The Protestant Reformation changed all of that. In 1517, a Catholic monk named Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation by writing, publishing, and distributing his critiques of the church’s selling of indulgences called the 95 Theses .

Martin Luther believed that the only true word of God was the Bible and that people did not need a pope, bishops, or priests to interpret it for them. He felt that the Catholic Church had corrupted what the Bible actually said and that the selling of indulgences was just one example.

In response, Luther had the Bible printed in the languages that most people spoke and created a new church called Lutheran Church. Later, many other Protestant churches were created by other leaders of the Reformation.

Many monarchs especially in Northern Europe converted to Protestant religions as a way of freeing themselves from the power the Catholic Church held over them since the Middle Ages.

Source: Adapted from http://www.biography.com/people/martin­luther­9389283#later­year

Question

Monarchs (Kings and queens)

Catholic Clergy (People who work for the

church like the Pope, bishops, and priests)

Intellectuals (Artists, Philosophers,

Scientists)

Peasants (Farmers, workers, lower

class people)

5 

 

How did the Protestant Reformatio

n affect you?

Review Topic #4- Political Life: Absolute Monarchs Ruled in Most European Countries

In the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s, some monarchs in Europe became very wealthy thanks to the increase in trade during the Renaissance and colonies established during the Age of Exploration. As a result, they were able to pay for large and powerful armies and expand their land and power. These kings and queens are known as Absolute Monarchs. Most of the countries in Europe were ruled by absolute monarchs in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some of the absolute monarchs you studied last year were Louis XIV of France and Peter the Great of Russia.

Source: NYS Global History and Geography Regents Exam, June, 2012.

Charles I, being crowned by a hand from a cloud, possibly by God (1600s) A DEO REX, A REGE LEX — “The king is from God, and law is from the king.” -James I

Absolute monarchs and people they ruled believed in divine right. DIVINE RIGHT is the belief that one’s authority to rule comes directly from God. Since the king received his authority to rule directly from God, this meant:

● The king had the 'right' to rule completely and totally without approval from the people ● The king was God’s representative on earth ● Only God could judge the king

6 

 

Question

Monarchs (Kings and queens)

Catholic Clergy (People who work for the

church like the Pope, bishops, and priests)

Nobles (wealthy landowners)

Peasants (Farmers, workers, lower

class people)

How did the rule of absolute

monarchs affect you?

Review Topic #5- Scientific Revolution (1600s- late 1700s): A New Way to Look at the World

The Renaissance brought ideas from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and from Asia, Northern Africa, and the Middle East to Western Europe. Those ideas, combined with religious doctrine from the Catholic Church became the basis of knowledge in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. As Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation changed the way people looked at religion in Western Europe, the Scientific Revolution changed the way people understood the world. The scientific revolution was the beginning of modern science when advances in mathematics, physics, astronomy and biology gave people a better understanding of the world around them and led them to question what they were being told by monarchs and the Catholic Church. Scientists, known as “natural philosophers,” used the scientific method to examine the world. To use the method a scientist generated an hypothesis, about solving a problem, experimented to test the hypothesis, observed and collected information based on the experiment, used reason and logic to draw conclusions, and then shared his or her findings with other scientists to discuss them. This process was very different that the way of finding truth in the Middle Ages, which was to ask a member of the clergy. Scientists in the 1600s and 1700s discovered natural laws, facts proven true through the scientific method, that disproved what the Catholic Church claimed. For example, Galileo Galilei, an astronomer whose ideas were based on an earlier scientist named Nicholas Copernicus, wrote about and taught that the sun was at the center of the solar system, an idea called the heliocentric theory. The church claimed that the Earth was at the center and that the sun revolved around it. In 1633, Galileo was convicted of heresy, teaching an idea the was in opposition to the church, was forced to state that he was wrong and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Many other discoveries were made during the Scientific Revolution that changed human history including Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion and gravity and advances in every field of science and technology.

Question

Monarchs (Kings and queens)

Catholic Clergy (People who work for the

church like the Pope, bishops, and priests)

Nobles (wealthy landowners)

Peasants (Farmers, workers, lower

class people)

7 

 

How did the

Scientific Revolution affect you?

Conclusion

Questions What are you concerned about in 1750? What do you hope will happen in the next hundred years?

Monarchs (Kings and queens)

Catholic Clergy (People who work for the church

like the Pope, bishops, and priests)

Nobles (Wealthy landowners)

Merchants

8 

 

Intellectuals (Artists, Philosophers, Scientists)

Peasants (Farmers, workers, lower class

people)

9