-too-worldly goals" (Mumford 316).
Sometime between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, a new spirit emerged that broke out of the chrysalis of the medieval city and the medieval mode of thought. A new age began, one which by long convention is called the Renaissance. In retrospect we may tend to exaggerate the sharpness of the break, perhaps because in England it was exceptionally sharp; in a single generation, England goes from the medieval world of the War of the Roses to the very different Renaissance world of Henry VIII. In other places, such as Italy, the transition was far more gradual, and there is no wholesale revolution either in thought or in visible style.
None the less, there is a great transition in modes of thought, and it is one that can be linked to a certain new type of freedom, an intellectual and moral freedom that broke through the constraints of the ordered and heirarchical medieval world-view. Men began to compare themselves not to a religious ideal, but to a secular and human one, the standards of classical antiquity--or at least of antiquity as the people of the Renaissance perceived it. The very term Renaissance, "rebirth," though given to the period much later, reflects the new way in which people looked at the past and at themselves.
If the Renaissance was an age of intellectual freedom, it was certainly not one of political freedom. In ancient Greece, the cultural florescence that we call the Golden Age coincided (at least in Athens) with the fullest democratization of the political order in the age of Pericles. In contrast, the republican and quasi-democratic institutions of the Italian city-states belong to the medieval period, and were in decline by the Renaissance: "In most cities, the regime of a single individual was able to secure acceptance before the end of the fourteenth century" (Waley 221).
The medieval republics suffered from a variety of destabilizing factors, wh...