Editing History of Europe (section)

===Renaissance===
{{Main|Renaissance}}
[[File:Pacioli.jpg|thumb|''[[Portrait of Luca Pacioli]]'', the founder of accounting, by [[Jacopo de' Barbari]] ([[Museo di Capodimonte]])]]

Despite these crises, the 14th century was also a time of great progress within the arts and sciences. A renewed interest in ancient [[Ancient Greece|Greek]] and [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] led to the [[Italian Renaissance]], a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the north, west and [[middle Europe]] during a cultural lag of some two and a half centuries, its influence affected literature, philosophy, art, politics, science, history, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. The Humanists saw their repossession of a great past as a Renaissance – a rebirth of civilization itself.<ref>{{cite book|author=Robert A. Nisbet|title=History of the Idea of Progress|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QDRWfZ9Ydw0C&pg=PA103|year=1980|publisher=Transaction Publishers|page=103|isbn=978-1-4128-2548-1}}</ref> Important political precedents were also set in this period. [[Niccolò Machiavelli]]'s political writing in ''[[The Prince]]'' influenced later absolutism and realpolitik. Also important were the many patrons who ruled states and used the artistry of the Renaissance as a sign of their power.

The [[Scientific Revolution]] took place in Europe starting towards the second half of the Renaissance period, with the 1543 [[Nicolaus Copernicus]] publication ''[[De revolutionibus orbium coelestium]]'' (''On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres'') often cited as its beginning.