THE Renaissance is a movement which developed in the 14th century in Italy and then it spread all over Europe during the 16^th century.

Renaissance means rebirth: indeed in this period men needed to feel detached from the Middle Ages vision of the world. During the Middle Ages the most important value was religion: God gave sense to life and it follows that the only goal was to reach salvation.

A first basic change in the opposition between religious values and material bodies appeared during Humanism: indeed men wanted to integrate the soul with the body. Humanism started to put human beings at the centre of investigations. Men were not satisfied only with religion, because they felt their body as something knowable and valuable. Another missing point people felt towards Middle Ages cultural point of view on life, was the need to increase their knowledge: in the Middle Ages people were supposed to and should know only the religious fundamentals of life, while Humanistic intellectuals had the desire to expand and to investigate human nature.

The Renaissance kept the ancient Greeks as a model, to equilibrate the contradiction between God and the human beings’ bodily nature. In Greece people were proud of their body and it was a way to affirm their values.

The Renaissance maintained the Middle Ages vision of the ‘chain of being’ which asserted that everything in the world has a specific place in an hierarchical order, and a specific function; indeed Renaissance thinkers still needed a world without chaos, organized in a strict order. This implied the doctrine of “correspondences”, indeed they viewed a human being as a microcosm, which reflected the structure of the whole world, that was the macrocosm.

During Renaissance “imitation” was an important feature, because it allowed to find a balance and to avoid chaos. Imitating classical authors, Renaissance writers started to use classical literary forms: the most important were comedy, tragedy, epic and satire.

Considerable political changes took place during the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages political debates were based on the conflict between papacy and empire. In the Renaissance central government consolidates, with the development of monarchies in many countries of Europe.

Finally, Reformation implied the rejection of the Church corruption and prosperity of the papacy. Martin Luther thought that believers should reach God and salvation in their interiority, without the priests as mediator and refused the Pope as a spiritual leader.