ABSTRACT
The problem of the transition from feudalism to capitalism has excited considerable scholarly attention, both as part of a general reassessment of the writings of ‘classical’ sociologists and, more recently among economic and social historians, as a perspective that breaks free of confining disciplinary boundaries.1 It has figured much less prominently within the conventional history of art and culture (including the history of science), whose distinctions, fixed by Burckhardt, assign a positive value to this intermediary zone as ‘humanism’ and the ‘Renaissance’.2
