ABSTRACT
The Renaissance is one of the truly great intellectual and cultural periods in human history. It was mainly centred on Italy but spread through the whole of Christian Europe. The great intellectual and cultural achievements of Christian Europe during the Renaissance were such that they not only equalled but even surpassed those of ancient Greece. The great scientific achievements of the Renaissance were mainly of an astronomical nature. The writings represented a tremendous legacy in philosophy and scholarship, but in science much of the good was counteracted by the dogma of Aristotle in cosmology and natural philosophy, which presented an impediment to the development of science through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. The scientific revolution that was to occur laid the foundation of modern science; it started in the sixteenth century in the later stages of the Renaissance and was complete before the end of the seventeenth century.
