AP® European History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/euro/units/5/5-8)
Unit 5 · Topic 5.8
5.8 Romanticism
Romanticism was a cultural movement from the late 1700s into the 1800s that valued emotion, imagination, nature and the past over the Enlightenment's focus on reason. Romantic writers, painters and composers celebrated individual feeling and national traditions, helping fuel nationalism, while religious revivals stressed heartfelt faith.
Key terms
- Romanticism
- the sublime in nature
- folk culture
- Caspar David Friedrich
- Methodism
- nationalism
A reaction to the Enlightenment
Romantics did not reject reason entirely, but they believed it couldn't capture everything that mattered. Emotion, intuition, imagination and spiritual experience were also paths to truth. Where the Enlightenment looked for universal laws, Romantics celebrated the unique individual, the unique nation and the mysterious.
Rousseau was a forerunner. He praised feeling, nature and the natural goodness of people before society corrupted them. In Germany, the Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) movement of the 1770s also stressed passion; Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), about a young man destroyed by unrequited love, became a sensation.
Key themes
- Emotion and the individual: the artist as a passionate genius expressing inner feeling.
- Nature and the sublime: the sublime is the overwhelming awe, even terror, that people feel before vast mountains, storms or seas. Nature was a source of spiritual truth, often contrasted with growing cities and industry.
- The past, especially the Middle Ages: Romantics admired Gothic cathedrals, legends and chivalry that Enlightenment writers had called backward.
- Folk culture and nation: Johann Gottfried Herder argued that each people has its own national spirit expressed in its language, songs and stories. The Brothers Grimm collected German folk tales, publishing their first volume in 1812, to preserve that spirit.
- The supernatural and exotic: ghosts, dreams and distant lands, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).
Romantic artists and writers
In England, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads (1798), poems in everyday language celebrating nature and ordinary people. Lord Byron became the model of the rebellious Romantic hero.
Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter, showed small human figures facing vast landscapes, as in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (about 1818), where a man stands on a rocky peak looking over mist-covered mountains. J. M. W. Turner painted swirling storms and seas. In music, Ludwig van Beethoven broke Classical forms to express powerful emotion.
Religious revival
Romanticism had a religious side that pushed back against Enlightenment deism and skepticism. In Germany, Pietism stressed personal devotion and Bible study over formal doctrine. In England, John Wesley began preaching in open fields in the late 1730s and founded Methodism, which emphasized a personal, emotional experience of God's grace and reached working people the Church of England neglected. After the Revolution's attacks on the Church, Catholicism revived too; François-René de Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity (1802) praised its beauty and emotional power.
Why it matters politically
By valuing each nation's language and folk traditions, Romanticism fed nationalism, especially in German lands under Napoleon's rule and later in Italy, Poland and Greece. Romanticism could serve either side: some Romantics were conservatives who loved tradition, faith and monarchy, while others were liberals and nationalists who dreamed of freedom (see 7.8).
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Reading an image in context
Short-answer practice: A painting from about 1818 shows a lone man, seen from behind, standing on a rocky peak above a sea of mist and distant mountains. Explain how this image reflects Romanticism.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Identify the visual features.
- Step 2: Link each to a Romantic theme.
- Step 3: Contrast with the Enlightenment if useful.
Answer: Model answer: The vast, misty landscape and the lone figure gazing into it express the Romantic idea of the sublime, the awe people feel before nature's power. Unlike Enlightenment art that celebrated reason and civic virtue, this painting, Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, focuses on individual feeling and nature as a source of spiritual meaning.
Common mistakes
- Defining Romanticism as love stories. It is about emotion, nature, the individual and the past, not romance in the modern sense.
- Treating Romanticism as only conservative or only liberal. It fed both.
- Forgetting the religious revival. Methodism and Pietism are part of the same reaction against cold reason.
On the exam
- Image questions often contrast Neoclassical and Romantic works. Look for order and duty versus emotion and wild nature.
- Link Romanticism to nationalism; that connection shows up often in causation questions.
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself
5 questions on 5.8 Romanticism. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
The following describes a painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, painted around 1818.
A man in a dark green coat stands alone on a rocky peak with his back to the viewer, gripping a walking stick. Below and in front of him, a vast sea of fog fills the valleys, broken only by jagged rocks and distant mountain ridges that fade into a pale, hazy sky. We cannot see his face; we see only what he sees.
Description of a painting held by the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany.
The painting best reflects which characteristic of Romanticism?
Romanticism such as Friedrich's is best understood as a reaction against
Source 1: Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language . . . and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. . . . For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . .
Source 2: In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine . . . .
Source 1: William Wordsworth, English poet, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, second edition, 1800. Source 2: John Wesley, Anglican clergyman and founder of Methodism, journal entry for May 24, 1738.
The two sources most clearly share an emphasis on
Wordsworth's choice of "low and rustic life" as a subject most closely parallels
Source 2 best illustrates which development of the 1700s?
0 of 5 answered