Renaissances

The Italian Renaissance retains its extraordinary hold on the historical imagination. What began as arediscoveryy of the culture and values of the ancient world came to invent our notion of the 'Middle Ages' and continues to pose sharp and searching questions as to what we regard as the beginning of the 'modern' era. However, what was 'the Italian Renaissance'? Was there a singlephenomenonn that affected the entire peninsula and had meaning for all or even most of its people from the age of the painter Giotto in the fourteenth century to that of the astronomer Galileo in the seventeenth? This…