"In this new survey of the development of European intellectual culture between about 1300 and 1535, Anthony Levi offers a fresh view of the Renaissance and the Reformation, calling for a reassessment of the nature of both. Through a radical and detailed examination of the significant intellectual, spiritual, and ideological developments across Europe during this period, Levi disputes the discontinuities commonly understood to explain and defend the events we term the "Renaissance" and the "Reformation." He argues that the renewed cult of the literary, visual, and educational norms of classical antiquity were a consequence - not the essence or cause - of the Renaissance. Further, the Reformation emerged from a cultural movement that neither constituted a historical break nor led to the catastrophic religious clashes of the sixteenth century. He offers a revisionist account of the collapse of scholastic intellectual systems and traces its course."--BOOK JACKET.