1. Who were the principal later French humanist writers? How do their works reflect the intellectual, religious, and social situation of sixteenth-century France?
2. Under what circumstances did Cervantes write Don Quixote? What are the literary antecedents of the book, and how does it move beyond those sources?
3. Why is Shakespeare widely regarded as the West's leading playwright? In what literary genres did he write, and what common thematic concerns do these diverse writings display? How did the structure of the Globe Theater affect the way in which his plays were viewed and performed?
4. Who were the major writers of Renaissance England in addition to Shakespeare? For what works are they best known, and how do those works reflect and/or question humanist values?
5. Who were the major artists of the Northern Renaissance? What are the defining characteristics of their styles, and how do these reflect and/or depart from the techniques of the Italian Renaissance? Which of these artists were especially affected by the upheavals of the Reformation, and how does their work reflect that effect?
6. Who were the leading later Italian Renaissance painters? What important techniques did they develop, and how did they execute these in their own work?
7. How did the status and role of musicians change between 1450 and 1600? How did these changes affect the type of music composed and performed during this period?
8. Who were the leading polyphonic composers of this period? How did their styles break with the medieval ars nova?
9. How does contrapuntal music differ from polyphonic? Who were the leading contrapuntal composers, and how did they employ that technique? What further innovations did these composers develop?
10. What advances in printing changed the way in which music was published? How did Netherlandish composers in particular benefit from these advances?
11. How did a distinctly English musical tradition develop during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? Who were the principal figures of this tradition, and what did they contribute to it?
12. What was the range of thought concerning music among the Protestant reformers? How did these ideas affect the development of a distinctly Protestant musical tradition?
13. How did Italian composers rise to prominence after 1550, and what role did the Council of Trent play in that rise? Who were the leading composers, and what did they contribute to the evolution of Western music?
14. How did Renaissance humanism give rise to the modern humanism of the Enlightenment and subsequent periods? How has secular humanism fared in recent decades?