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The Renaissance typically refers to a period in European history approximately between 1400 and 1600.

"Renaissance" comes from the French word for "rebirth."

Some major developments of the Renaissance include astronomy, humanist philosophy, the printing press, vernacular language in writing, painting and sculpture technique, world exploration and, in the late Renaissance, Shakespeare's works.

The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.

Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. T

Also known as the “Dark Ages,” the era is often branded as a time of war, ignorance, famine and pandemics such as the Black Death.

he Renaissance – that cultural, political, scientific and intellectual explosion in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries – represents perhaps the most profoundly important period in human development since the fall of Ancient Rome. 

From its origins in 14th-century Florence, the Renaissance spread across Europe –

It coincided with a boom in exploration, trade, marriage and diplomatic excursions... and even war.

Early in the afternoon of April 7th, 1498, Charles VIII of France escorted his queen, Anne of Brittany, to an antiquated gallery at his chateau of Amboise, to watch a game of tennis

After the travails of Valois France during the Hundred Years War and the kingdom's subsequent recovery under Charles VII and Louis XI, few magnates any longer felt inclined to contest the title of a mature heir apparent.

Louis himself had been brought up in relatively impecunious circumstances, thanks partly to the antipathy of the late Louis XI towards him and his house. There were nobles who had felt that the ruler's treatment of them and their kind as well as his alleged general misgovernment warranted conspiracy and even revolt against him. Although Louis d'Orleans had been far too young to engage in that reign's most concerted expression of magnate resentment, the War of the Public Weal, he had rationalised in comparable terms his own behaviour under Charles VIII.

“Shimmer of Gold: Giovanni di Paolo in Renaissance Siena.” The exhibition reunites five sections of the Branchini Altarpiece, a masterly work by Giovanni (c. 1399-1482), one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive artists of his time and place

People use the phrase “Middle Ages” to describe Europe between the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century.

The phrase “Middle Ages” tells us more about the Renaissance that followed it than it does about the era itself.

European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

In June 1488, just three years after Henry VII’s unlikely victory in the English Midlands, James IV became king on the battlefield of Sauchieburn south of Stirling, close to the spot where Robert Bruce had won his great victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.

James IV was brought up at Stirling Castle by his mother, Margaret of Denmark, alongside his two younger brothers. The queen had produced three healthy sons but she and James III led separate lives after an earlier rebellion in 1482. The king, who had managed to alienate all of his siblings, believed that his wife had sided with his brother, the Duke of Albany, when the duke returned from exile in France and invaded Scotland with the future Richard III of England. James III seems also to have felt that his eldest son was tainted by contact with Albany and perhaps considered barring the boy from the succession

James IV was ruler of a land famously described in a letter written by its own nobility in 1320 to Pope John XXII as ‘the tiny country of Scotia lying on the very edge of the inhabited world’. Scotland was poor, cold and wet. Edinburgh, its capital, held only 12,000 citizens, in contrast to London’s 50,000. Yet, like its new monarch, the country was not inward-looking.  Difficulty of travel by road over rugged terrain meant that it had long relied on sea routes for transport and communication with the wider world. The kings of Scotland were determined not to be overlooked in Europe. They forged trade and political alliances with Scandinavia and were long-standing allies of the French, who viewed Scotland as a brake on the ambitions of England. The two countries that occupied the island of Britain were natural enemies, nowhere more so than in the Borders, where centuries-old feuds and the violence that fuelled them were adjudicated by special courts composed of English and Scots. But James III had attempted a policy of conciliation with England that was unpopular with his aristocracy and Henry VII, a cautious man, did not relish constant war with his northern neighbour. It remained to be seen how James IV would approach Anglo-Scottish relations and how he would develop his ambition to make Scotland a European power.

One was of Henry VIII of England and the other was of Francis I of France. Their symbolic presence at the beginning of an ambitious project designed to link England and France was especially appropriate. Henry VIII is often called a 'Renaissance prince' and is popularly remembered for his ebullience and the extraordinariness of his reign

influenced by his relationship with that other 'Renaissance prince', Francis I

France and England been so drawn together by some higher ideal or imperative

European art history began with early mobile anthropomorphic carvings in the Paleolithic era, as well as cave paintings reflecting the natural world. Europe took a distinct turn from other regions with the rise of the Greek empire, and Greek classical art and architecture influenced later European art for centuries. The Christian church influenced much of medieval art until the Renaissance, when a revival in classical ideas turned artistic attention to humanistic themes.

From 1100 onward, Gothic architecture experiments with innovations to construct wider, taller buildings in stone. This results in innovations such as the pointed arch and flying buttresses, as architects compete across Europe to build ever-taller cathedrals. Gothic painting develops later, as artists focus on religious scenes painted on panels or frescoes.

Around 1563, the Council of Trent adopts a propagandistic stance in which art is to stimulate the public's interest and faith in the Roman Catholic church. This is partially in response to the Renaissance and its subsequent developments, such as the Reformation.

Morris takes on theories which "suggest that there is something unique about western culture". His argument is simple: "from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea," there were philosophers wrestling with the same questions "and finding similar answers" as Socrates. "Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path". What can I say? Does Morris, a specialized Professor of Classics, seriously believe that Indian and Chinese thinkers were reasoning in ways similar to Europeans? First of all, one of the exceptional qualities about the West is the continuous sequence of original thinkers in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Christian and in Modern Europe. The mere appearance of a Socrates at one point in time is not the issue. Find me in ancient Asia a continuous line of original thinkers

Morris brings up the Renaissance only to tell us that there were renaissances everywhere. The revivals ones sees in Asia history were always revivals of the same traditional ways of thinking; imagine Europeans for ever writing textual studies of Plato

Christianity? -- well, Morris says that all religions are the same. Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different religious traditions, and not only because the former has exhibited a far richer scholarly tradition, which is rather visible in the immediate fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman Law, and Christian theology in the first centuries AD, not to mention the Middle Ages, but because in Islam the idea that Allah has limits to his own powers, by making an everlasting covenant, with human beings, is unthinkable, in that Allah is viewed as absolutely transcendent; whereas for Christianity the authority of the earthly rulers is limited by God's law, which both grants rights to every person and holds that God is conterminous with Reason. There is no self-limitation to the sovereignty of Islamic rulers, and for this reason Islam has faced great difficulties producing a secular political order subject to constitutional checks and balances.

This was the reputation acquired by Francis the First in his own time and reverently preserved by subsequent generations. His mother, Louise of Savoy, laid its foundation even before it was certain that he would inherit the throne of his second cousin, Louis XII. In 1504 she had a medallion engraved in honour of the ten-year-old Duke of Valois

While Francis I has been remembered as the chivalrous leader who sustained a long and unequal struggle against the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, he has also been described as the King of the Renaissance

There are, however, other aspects of Francis I that are less consistent with the popular impression. He was the autocrat who built upon the work of Louis XI in creating the despotism of the new monarchy.

round 1568, Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli—a self-taught painter who ran an all-woman artists’ workshop out of her convent—embarked on her most ambitious project yet: a monumental Last Supper scene featuring life-size depictions of Jesus and the 12 Apostles.

The Florentine monastery of Santa Maria Novella acquired the painting in 1817, housing it in the refectory before moving it to a new location around 1865. In 1911, scholar Giovanna Pierattini reported, the portable panel was “removed from its stretcher, rolled up and moved to a warehouse, where it remained neglected for almost three decades.”

Plautilla’s Last Supper remained in storage until 1939, when it underwent significant restoration. Returned to the refectory, the painting sustained slight damage during the momentous flooding of Florence in

The great period of discovery from the latter half of the fifteenth through the sixteenth century is generally referred to as the Age of Exploration.

The age is also recognized for the first English voyage around the world by Sir Francis Drake (ca. 1540–1596), who claimed the San Francisco Bay for Queen ElizabethEssayElizabethan England ; Vasco da Gama’s (ca. 1460–1524) voyage to IndiaEssayThe Art of the Mughals before 1600 , making the Portuguese the first Europeans to sail to that country and leading to the exploration of the west coast of Africa; Bartolomeu Dias’ (ca. 1450–1500) discovery of the Cape of Good Hope; and Ferdinand Magellan’s (1480–1521) determined voyage to find a route through the Americas to the east, which ultimately led to discovery of the passage known today as the Strait of Magellan.

In addition to the discovery and colonization of far off lands, these years were filled with major advances in cartography and navigational instruments, as well as in the study of anatomyEssayAnatomy in the Renaissance and optics.

American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion

Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.