1. What does the word renaissance mean, and where and when did the Renaissance first occur?
2. What is the connection between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages? What special conditions gave rise to the Italian Renaissance?
3. Which forms of government predominated among the Italian city-states? In the end, which was the most successful? Why?
4. In what ways did the social patterns of Renaissance Italy depart from those of the rest of Europe?
5. What are some connections between Renaissance society and Renaissance art and culture?
6. What is humanism and how did it begin? What did the humanists contribute to education and history?
7. What is the difference between civic humanism and the princely ideal of government, and from what does this difference come?
8. To what extent did Machiavelli invent a new politics by standing the ideal of princely rule on its head?
9. What is perspective? To whom do we owe the discovery of its rules?
10. What is the basic difference between early and Late Renaissance painting?
11. What factors encouraged the spread of the Renaissance into the western European monarchies and the Rhineland?
12. To what key invention do we owe the rise of the printing press? What were the effects of the printing press on European civilization?
13. Why is the Renaissance considered the departure from the Middle Ages and beginning of modernity?