The year is 1390 CE, and life is hard. The plague has killed nearly half the people in your city. What are the kings, queens, and nobility doing about it? Not much—they're fighting wars that seem endless.
It used to be that the Church tried to help. These days, though, its leaders seem too busy with politics to care about regular people. If you lived in this time, what would you do?
In the city of Florence, people began thinking in new ways. The city leaders wanted their culture to be like those of ancient Greece and Rome. They thought life could be richer. It could be full of art, poetry, music, and history. People should know about many subjects, they thought—not just their own trade. It's as if they said, “Society should be reborn!”
The word renaissance is French for “rebirth” or “reawakening.” Let’s explore how the Renaissance began.
