Hitherto we have viewed the age mainly through the personality of individuals.  It remains to consider some of the features of the Renaissance when it had spread across the Alps—­to France, to Spain, to Switzerland, to Germany, to England—­and some of the contrasts that it presents with the earlier movement in Italy.  The story of the Italian Renaissance has often been told; and we need not go back upon it here.  On the side of the revival of learning it was without doubt the great age.  The importance of its discoveries, the fervour of its enthusiasm have never been equalled.  But though it remains pre-eminent, the period that followed it has an interest of its own which is hardly less keen and presents the real issues at stake in a clearer light.  Awakened Italy felt itself the heiress of Rome, and thus patriotism coloured its enthusiasm for the past.  To the rest of Western Europe this source of inspiration was not open.  They were compelled to examine more closely the aims before them; and thus attained to a calmer and truer estimate of what they might hope to gain from the study of the classics.  It was not the revival of lost glories, thoughts of a world held in the bonds of peace:  in those dreams the Transalpines had only the part of the conquered.  Rather the classics led them back to an age before Christianity; and pious souls though they were, the scholar’s instinct told them that they would find there something to learn.  Christianity had fixed men’s eyes on the future, on their own salvation in the life to come; and had trained all knowledge, even Aristotle, to serve that end.  In the great days of Greece and Rome the world was free from this absorbing preoccupation; and inquiring spirits were at liberty to find such truth as they could, not merely the truth that they wished or must.

Another point of difference between Italy and the Transalpines is in the resistance offered to the Renaissance in the two regions.  The scholastic philosophy and theology was a creation of the North.  The greatest of the Schoolmen found their birth or training in France or Germany, at the schools of Paris and Cologne; and with the names of Duns, Hales, Holcot, Occam, Burley and Bradwardine our own islands stand well to the fore.  The situation is thus described by Aldus in a letter written to the young prince of Carpi in October 1499, to rejoice over some translations from the Greek just arrived from Linacre in England:  ’Of old it was barbarous learning that came to us from Britain; it conquered Italy and still holds our castles.  But now they send us learned eloquence; with British aid we shall chase away barbarity and come by our own again.’  The teaching of the Schoolmen made its way into Italy, but had little vogue; and with the Church, through such Popes as Nicholas V, on the side of the Renaissance, resistance almost disappeared.  The humanists charging headlong dissipated their foes in a moment, but were soon carried beyond the field of battle, to fall into the hands of the forces of reaction.  Across the Alps, on the other hand, the Church and the universities stood together and looked askance at the new movement, dreading what it might bring forth.  In consequence the ground was only won by slow and painful efforts, but each advance, as it was made, was secured.