The chapter "European Society in the Age of the Renaissance" examines the primarily positive aspects of the Renaissance and its impact on Italy and ultimately on the rest of Europe. It is the thesis of the chapter that there occurred in Europe in the 14th through the 16th centuries a revolution in economics, culture, religion and politics which entirely transformed the continent.
Just as the European Renaissance was rooted in the Italian Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance was rooted in an economic factors:
The Italian Renaissance rested on the phenomenal economic growth of the High Middle Ages. In the period from 1050 to 1300, a new economy emerged based on Venetian and Genoese shipping and long-distance trade and on Florentine banking and cloth manufacture (432-433).
This economic growth created a "wealthy aristocratic class" which were at the heart of the cultural and intellectual development and expansion which commenced in the 14th century and which served as the essence of the Italian and European Renaissance.
Another important aspect of the foundation of the Renaissance was the political evolution which accompanied the economic transformation. However, this political evolution hardly echoed the kind of freedom and humanism which marked the intellectual efforts of the era:
In the city-states of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, oligarchic or despotic powers governed; Renaissance culture was manipulated to enhance the power of those rulers (433).
The chapter examines the various aspects of this development in the different countries of Europe through the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, focusing inevitably on the Italian examples as the building blocks of the entire transformation. It can be argued that this concentration of political power was necessary for the development of the intellectual and cultural advances made in the Renaissance, but it can also be argued that any such concentration of power ...