two centuries of innovative ideas and barely changing medical practice Ludo Vandamme and Johan R. Boelaert
The ‘new’ world of the sixteenth century spanned the globe for the first time. World trade shifted with it from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic space, while large, centrally governed global empires became laboratories of modern state thinking. The most powerful of these was the Spanish Habsburg empire on which ‘the sun never set’ and to which the Low Countries also belonged. Not only had the world changed, above all people viewed it differently: it became a world of and for the people. This immense interest in human beings and in humanity found its purest expression in humanism – a broad intellectual movement that spread from Italy throughout Europe, achieving a widespread social and religious impact. Critical thought now began to reject slavish adherence to established commentaries on the supposed sources of knowledge, the auc-
toritates. Humanists wanted to examine these authorities at first hand. They feverishly sought out authentic sources from antiquity and early Christianity ad fontes: the Bible, of course, but also Justinian, Galen, Plato and Aristotle, among many others. Language and art were also tested against the idealized image of antiquity. Some wanted to go even further, to build a new, ideal society, although they did not get much further at this point than the blueprint Thomas More set out in his Utopia. Humanism owed much of its dynamism to the art of printing, which for the first time allowed texts to be produced and distributed quickly and affordably, enabling new ideas, insights and convictions to be picked up immediately among scholars or shared by large swathes of the population. Without the book printers, Protestantism would never have developed into a mass movement that brought about a permanent schism in the Western Church.
Bruges, with its 30–40,000 inhabitants, was the metropolis of the ‘old world’, no longer a hub of the new, global economy. That role passed to Antwerp, whose population grew rapidly in the sixteenth century to around 100,000. Nevertheless, Bruges remained a compelling, international city, with lively trade, diverse and high-quality manufacturing, and a sophisticated intellectual life. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–1536) described Bruges as the ‘Athens of the North’, and while the celebrated Dutch humanist could always be relied on for a bold statement, there was something in his claim. Erasmus had many friends and kindred spirits in Bruges, and even considered setting permanently in the city. Bruges’s fine manners, sociability and concern about the urban community made life there very pleasant: there was more to humanism, after all, than just the exploration of ancient wisdom in
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