It is very convenient, and not always misleading, to visualize the culture of a society as simply a loose assembly of various coherent activities being pursued in more or less regular fashion, and with interrelations, under a common umbrella of an assortment of shared values. For instance, history gives us glimpses of a world of medieval kings and barons and farmers and merchants, priests and monks and friars and teachers and writers and builders and sculptor-craftsmen going about their affairs, largely dominated by a framework of beliefs and institutions of a universal Christian Church, and carrying on their various traditions of war, government, crafts, trades, theology, building, sculpting, writing, etc.

A cultural 'picture' of this kind cannot possibly correspond to reality unless we also take account of something that has already been mentioned: namely creativity, novelty. Or more widely still, change of virtually any kind. It may come from outside or from within, it may be well or ill perceived (like changes in population), a discovery or an invention, willed or unwilled, accepted or rejected: any intrusion changes the picture. Perhaps only within a tradition, to begin with (in that medieval world of ad 1200), examples of novelty include a new kind of religious order, the creation of a hybrid corporation of learning, the spread of some newly recovered writings of Aristotle, the windmill, the compass, history writing in the vernacular); but sooner or later, to the extent that there are interconnections, there are repercussions in other areas too. Typically, a 'new' style makes others old; a new grouping of individuals coming together develops its own ideas, different from those already existing; or to take an example fresh in our own memories, changes occurring after 1945 in European societies, aided by inputs from elsewhere, open the way to changes in the 1960s which can be traced in music, clothes, theology, literature, manners, philosophy, drama, work attitudes, sexual mores, politics . . . and these changes are all in some manner interconnected.

The idea is commonplace enough, if difficult to pin down; these complex processes, constellations of change, are never absolutely identical, always unique. At best we can point to one or two invariable, indeed logical, features of them: they are associated with time-lags (the provinces are backward, the old coexists with the new), and they introduce stresses within a culture: resentments, the need for new accommodations . . . Other features we shall return to in a closing section of this book. But for the moment, we have to retain the plain fact that no culture ever stands still, but is changing all the time and therefore subject to stresses always—however much we might prefer to believe that it can also possess a certain stability. That makes it much more difficult to describe at a moment in time; we are dealing not with a picture, but with a kind of huge animated cartoon—such of it as we can see— whose abstract shapes are constantly bulging and melting and transforming themselves into other shapes—changing colour, too, in the process—even though at any particular moment there is no absolute break in the continuity of the picture. There is no convenient way of rendering this in ordinary prose discourse.

Anyone at all may be the agent, witting or unwitting, by whom some eventually significant novelty enters the culture of a society; there are, however, two kinds of activity which we find especially closely related to change.

One of course is scientific discovery, with or without consequences in technology; for science is by definition concerned with introducing change into 'right' knowledge. In some forms it does this by simply adding, or extending, a habitual approach; in others, by bringing about a veritable Copernican revolution and opening out whole new avenues for further advance. Our own world is so massively aware of this, so well provided with theoretical analyses of the processes, paradigms, constellations of conditions involved, that we arc prone to map out the past in terms of 'progress'; progress being defined as solving problems in such a way as to enable further problems to be faced and in their turn solved. This vision is of course quite recent (Bacon, Descartes), and there have been huge tracts of earlier time when such an idea has been entirely absent from 'natural philosophy': ages satisfied with Ptolemy's astronomy, Greek doctrines of the four elements of nature, or the four humours of the body, or astrology, or alchemy. The scientist has not always been a revolutionary, a threat to stability.

The other category is the expressive arts. Artists (by which we mean painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, dramatists, architects, and so on, shading off into those concerned with the applied arts, dress design, media copy-writing, etc.) capture and objectify values and attitudes, collective perceptions and dreams and intimations, often with peculiar precision. Sometimes they do this to order, sometimes not; occasionally they convey more than they intend; but at their best they convey the very latest state of feeling, even when they are not out to announce it. It is not by accident that the word 'culture' is often narrowed down to refer to their business of producing expressive objects, the symbols or distillations of much more broadly-spreading patterns of value. By their nature artists are more or less fated to reflect change, and in modern European societies they have come to be expected, very often, to herald it, to anticipate it, to be prophets, seers, scouts of the future; but already in the earliest example of literary criticism known to us—Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs (405 bc)—the lately deceased Greek tragedian Euripides is taken to task for going along with what are evidently the then modemtastes of his Athenian audience. Creativeness in the arts is either a matter of building forward within an existing tradition or of moving to reflect in some new way the shift of outward circumstance and its bearing on a tradition, or both: and this is as true of Pheidias as of Henry Moore, of Rubens as of Max Ernst, of Euripides as of Samuel Beckett.

And just in case, in a tough-minded age, we should be tempted to think that the prominence being given here to expressive symbolism alongside scientific discovery is disproportionately large, and that the arts are 'only' arts, one might care to have in mind Plato's well- known, and repeated, attacks on poets and his resolve to have all arts heavily censored in his 'ideal' (closed) society of The Republic. Careful heed has been given to this recommendation in one way or another in nearly all societies of subsequent ages, including some well-known examples in the present day.

These somewhat abstract remarks are enough to supply us with a clue as to how to conduct our 'orientation'. Given that we are interested in 'large' cultural phenomena, we will attempt to sec them emerging in their original context: not with a view to investigating them in close detail there, but in order to see what society, what kind of culture, presides over their birth. Since we are interested in novelty as well as pattern, we shall seek to centre attention on each occasion on a relatively short span of time, a clip, so to speak, of one or two generations, and to localize so far as possible on one region or country. (In one instance, this localization is impossible: where we consider the transmission of the heritage of the ancient world to something more properly to be called Europe.) Of necessity we shall be looking at the arts for something more than hints—for rounded- out, dense presentations of values clotted together, either in the consensus of dominant parts of a society or in the outlook of quite small groups within it. But we cannot, obviously, confine ourselves to them: for example, if poets in the sixteenth century attempt to capture something of the scientific thought of that age, they are no longer doing so three centuries later.