Main Questions covered in this episode:

•How did humanism affect culture and the arts in fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy?

•What did the term Renaissance mean in the context of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy? What criticism have been leveled against it?

•How would you define Renaissance humanism? In what ways was the Renaissance a break with the Middle Ages, and in what ways did it owe its existence to medieval civilization?

•Who were some of the famous literary and artistic figures of the Italian renaissance? What did they have in common that might be described as “the spirit of the Renaissance”?

•How did the northern Renaissance affect culture in Germany, England, France, and Spain?

•How did the Renaissance in the north differ from the Italian Renaissance? In what ways was Erasmus the embodiment of the northern Renaissance?