Arts & Culture - Everyday Life
The everyday lives of Europeans evolved as Europe underwent cultural, religious, and political shifts in the early modern period. This period, characterized by the emergence and spread of new ideas, used literacy as a tool for change. People initially placed more value on education beginning in the sixteenth century because it helped to spread and enforce religion. Though literacy levels are hard to measure, it can be generalized that “urban upper classes of northwestern Europe” had the highest literacy levels, and “rural peasantry of south and east Europe” had the lowest levels (Wiesner-Hanks, 138). Even though the germination of philosophies and discoveries often began in upper class social and cultural institutions, knowledge diffused into the middle and lower classes. An emerging curiosity drove people of all classes to discuss texts they’d read and heard of. Humanism, which encouraged great thinkers to look back into ancient texts, made people reflect on how they interacted with the world around them. While Renaissance thinkers saw themselves “as part of a rebirth of classical culture,” Enlightenment thinkers believed that science and reason would “free them from the ancient past” (Wiesner-Hanks, 386). The lenses through which people viewed the world shifted. During the Renaissance, people reflected on how to reform the present while being informed by the past. This sense of reflection also encouraged people to reform the Catholic Church in the Protestant Reformation. People challenged old ways of thinking and proposed newer, more radical thoughts, especially during the Enlightenment. This is not to say that early modern Europe was constantly changing and progressing. Slavery, for example, was a growing market that faced little criticism until the eighteenth century. The way Europeans thought about and interacted with the world changed cultural, religious, and political institutions, thus affecting their daily lives.