The Renaissance.

After Europe recovered from the blight of plague, different commercial routes to Asia opened; new centralized political states formed; and disgruntled subjects began to challenge the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church. As scholars, governors, kings, and clergy grappled to understand the changes they witnessed around them, they together produced an intellectual, artistic, and cultural movement called the Renaissance which first started in the thirteenth century in the prosperous commercial city-states of the Italian peninsula. Today the vibrancy of this important movement can be seen in the artwork of Michelangelo, the inventiveness of Galileo, and the literary work of Dante.

Scholasticism And Humanism

The Renaissance transformed European thinking. During the Middle Ages scholasticism was the dominant mode of religious scholarship. It emphasized the rationality of the individual, and its practitioners sought to understand how faith...