<P> It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization--historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science--but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art . </P> <P> Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties". </P> <P> The word Renaissance, literally meaning "Rebirth" in French, first appeared in English in the 1830s . The word also occurs in Jules Michelet's 1855 work, Histoire de France . The word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century . </P> <P> The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period . Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry . Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art . </P>

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