THE RENAISSANCE 
During the Middle Ages, the most important values were God and salvation, therefore life after death was more important than the real life; all people efforts during the real life were directed to salvation. For the previous reason, the power of the Church (that played a role of supremacy in political, social and economic fields) was more important than the temporal power that was represented by William the Conqueror. One must remember that Feudalism had been introduced by the Emperor in 1066, distribuiting English lands to his knights and this political situation showed a pyramidal structure: at the top there was the Pope (who was the representative of God on earth), then there was the Emperor (William the Conqueror), the landed gentry and the knights, the merchants and then there were the serfs. So, during the Middle Ages there was a continuos fight between the two most important powers (the secular and the temporal power). A clear example of such struggle was the death of Thomas Becket (depicted for examle by Jeffrey Chouser in the Canterbury Tales – a collection of writings that tells about a group of pilligrims on the road to visit the S. Thomas Backet’s santuary -) who was killed by some knights and whose body was buried in the Canterbury Cathedral. In this period people understood that they needed something more than the safety of their souls, and understood the importance of the body (that at first was considered a source of sin and damnation) and the active life. The mentality changed, a new moviment called Humanism was developing (an ideological and cultural moviment that affirmed the dignity of human beings).
It goes whitout saying that the power of the Church gradually become weaker. People were encouraged to take part into public life, from political, cultural and scientific point of view.
The moviment that developed in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread to the north (including England) was the Renaissance (that ended in the mid-seventeenth century). “Renaissance” litterally means “rebirth” colon the rebirth implies something to be born again, indeed during this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest and study the classical antiquity.
Connected to Humanists ideals was the literary doctrine of Imitation: a concept derived from the classical past.
The task of the writers was to translate for present readers the moral visions of the past from the classical literature and adapting them to the modern world.
In this period people needed to avoid chaos; so they tried to learn lessons from the classical works to find a balance, and they found something in the classical antiquity (from classical literature colon latin and greek literature).
This signs a continuity with the past.
This was an age of new discoveries colon geographical (the exploration of the new world), intellectual and scientific (like the Copernicus theory: Copernicus said that the sun was at the centre of the planetary sistem, not the hearth –like Ptomely’s view- so he introduced the solar sistem and revised the Ptolemy’s global mapping). 
Moreover, the religion changed too and was very important the figure of Martin Luther. 
Luther, a German monk, reacted against Church corruption, he was in disagree with the Church policy, so his followers and him broke away from the Catholic Church because they protested about it. This is the reason why they were called “protestants”. They believed that the Church as an institution could not grant salvation; only through a direct personal relationship with God the believers could be saved. Consequently, Protestants stressed the need for all believers to read the Bible for themselvs. So, to make this possible, they translated the Bible from latin to many languages. This emphasis on the Bible had a significant impact on literature, bacause the Bible became a renewed source of literary inspiration.
Another important concept was The Great Chain of Being. It was a vision that took place in the Middle Age and has been transmicted to the classical period.
The Great Chain of Being was a hierarchical order where every element of the world foud their respective place. The fear of desorder created a clear view of the world. 
In addition, the hierarchical order was graduated by the relative proportion of “spirit” and “matter”. For example at the very top of the Chain there was God, then the angels, human beings, animals, the vegetative class and at the bottom there was the matter (the limit of the graduation). 
Despite that, in each of this large groups, there were other hierarchics. For example in the metal class, there are same metals more precious than others like gold, that was the noblest.
There was also the doctrine of “corrispondences”, which held that different segments of the Chain reflected other segments. For example, the microcosm reflected the structure of the macrocosm (the whole world). Indeed, the four elements of the world (air, earth, fire and water), were reflected in the human body, that was composed of four substances called “humors”. So illness was caused by a disorder of the humors. This was an example but Corrispondences existed everiwhere in many levels. 
As reguards the political situation, the Renaissance had brought an end for the most part of feudalism (that was the medieval form of political organization). Indeed, northen Europe, especially in England and France, saw the rise of national monarchies headed by kings. On the other hand, Italy  saw the rise of the territorial city-sate often headed by oligarchic families.