ABSTRACT
The two great spiritual revolutions generally known as Renaissance and Reformation form the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. Renaissance brought no immediately permanent conquests of the human mind; it was a brief, though gorgeous, flowering which bore fruit only in the eighteenth century. In many ways the development in Germany was different from that in France, England, and Spain. In these countries the Renaissance period witnessed the emergence of strong states which outgrew the vagueness, and shapeless universalism, of the Middle Ages and became the determining elements in the formation of the future modern nation. The nationalism of the German Renaissance literati deepened the historical consciousness of the Germans, though in an uncritical and unscientific way, and constructed for them a glorious past not only independent of Christianity and the Romans, but superior to them and more ancient. At the end of the Renaissance all life was again retheologized, and religion was the dominating political issue.
