Despite the problems experienced by Western Europe in the fifteenth century, describe some of the opportunities and positive developments that occurred during this century

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A. Opportunities for Western Europe
1. high mortality opened gaps in elites, which bureaucrats could fill, thanks, in
part, to a revolution in government
a. Western moralists redefined nobility as the product of virtue or
education rather than of ancestry
2. new economic divisions appeared
a. line of the Elbe and northern Danube rivers and the lands between
became a cultural fault line
1. to the west underpopulation boosted the value of labor,
liberating peasants and towns from landowners' control,
splitting landholdings, encouraging tenancies, converting
cropland to pasture
2. to the east landholders responded to loss of manpower and
revenue by clamping down on peasants' rights and forcing
formerly free towns into submission and new definitions of
nobility were rejected
3. showed signs of self-confidence and optimism
a. scholars and artists pursued, with renewed vigor, the project of
recovering the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome called the
Renaissance
b. admirers of classical learning adopted humanism, a predominantly
secular curriculum of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral
philosophy, imbibed mainly from classical texts