The Renaissance in England

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Renaissance in England
The word Renaissance is simply defined as “rebirth”. The total Renaissance movement was “felt in art, literature, science, music, politics, religion and other intellectual” aspects (Wikipedia, Renaissance). The movement started in Italy in the late decades of the 1300s and spread throughout Europe over the next two and half centuries.
The “term “Renaissance” was first used by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1858. The term stuck because it best described the period of transition between the medieval epoch in Europe and the beginning of the modern age” (Johnson 3). The three major events that shaped the Renaissance period were the printing press, voyages of discovery of Columbus and Vasco da Gama and the scientific revolution.
The “invention and manufacture of standard movable type allowed the beginning of the printing industry” (Thompson 210). “The first printed encyclopedia, the Catholica, appeared in 1460 and the following year a Strasbourg printer, Johan Mentelin, produced a Bible for laymen” (Johnson 18). The invention of printing made a large amount of material cheaply available (Thompson 210).
The invention of the printing press helped to make printed materials available to individuals of all social classes not only “to princes, scholars and individuals who could afford the materials” (Thompson 210). The printing press allowed the English language to stabilize. The availability of standardized print for punctuation, grammar and spelling looked the same. “No longer was literature a rarefied privileged domain” (Menon, Sindhu and Merriman, Renaissance in Literature). The invention of movable print and the ability to produce printed materials allowed the idea of trading printed books and material...

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... aspects of how the world worked (Thompson 210-211).
The importance of all the turning points in the Renaissance helped to open up new areas in science to study. The invention of printing was instrumental in allowing the world to read and to spread knowledge throughout the world about any subject. Through printing the total Renaissance movement was “felt in art, literature, science, music, politics, religion and other intellectual aspects” and still is today (Wikipedia, Renaissance).
There were many elements that were important in forming the Renaissance period. The inventions of printing, sea voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama combined with the exploration of the mechanisms of the earth were the most important. All of the elements did clarify how the Renaissance was a rebirth of printing, science and sailing over the seas to discover new areas of the universe.

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