1. Scope of the Renaissance

At the dawn of the Renaissance there was a strong sense of living in the end of days. Obscured by the shadow of the Middle Ages, the desire for a renewed identity, shaped by both humanitarian and scientific learning, was in its infancy. Artists and scientists began the work of dismantling everything that for centuries had been taken for granted. The Italian Renaissance contributed significantly to breaking down the boundaries—those of ideas as well as those of geography or demarcated by political power. The new entrepreneurship coming into force in Medici Florence, in Venice under the Doges and in Milan dominated by Ludovico il Moro, extended beyond geographical and political borders and found profitable links with Flanders and, therefore, with the Renaissance in the Low Countries (corresponding roughly to the present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg). The Renaissance has been a long thread stretched across centuries: from the earlier European Renaissance of the Middle Ages to the Japan of the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868); the Timurid Renaissance and then the Bengali Renaissance on the Indian subcontinent; the American Renaissance at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and from the ‘New Culture Movement’, which began in 1917, up to the present day, with the Chinese Renaissance taking place after centuries of oblivion of the Middle Kingdom. Today’s artistic and cultural upheavals in human and physical sciences herald a new renaissance, which could both affect and blend with entrepreneurship.