1. Period of transition.
Naturally it is impossible to say when the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began; scholars long ago abandoned any attempt at an exact or even approximate demarcation of boundaries. Franco Simone, writing on the impact of Italian literary influence on French fifteenth and sixteenth-century writing, observes that the process is a slow and gradual one, and underlines the diverse tendencies that were already apparent in the earlier, Medieval period (The French Renaissance, p. 24). A bid has indeed made, with some plausibility, for a kind of “Medieval Renaissance” (Haskins). Notwithstanding, for all the difficulty in placing it chronologically, a significant change did …
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Citation: Roe, J A. "The Renaissance in Literature". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 September 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1238, accessed 26 November 2024.]
