ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rise of an effervescent intellectual culture in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that historians have called the Renaissance. It explains how this culture was new, even as it notes the many things that bound it to the medieval culture from which it sprang. Among other thinkers considered are Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Marsilius of Padua (1275–1342), Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), and Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457).
