Renaissance literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Renaissance literature is European literature, after the Dark Ages over an extended period, usually considered to be initiated by Petrarch at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, and sometimes taken to continue to the English Renaissance and into the seventeenth century. The impact of the Renaissance varied across the continent: countries where Catholicism and emergent Protestantism were, or became, dominant experienced the Renaissance in a different manner to areas where the Orthodox Church was the dominant culture and those areas of Europe under Islamic rule.
The creation of the printing press encouraged authors to write in the local vernacular rather than in the classical languages of Greek and Latin, widening the reading audience and promoting the spread of Renaissance ideas.
Some famous authors of the literary movement of the Renaissance are Dante (writer of Divine Comedy), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus (The Praise of Folly), Sir Thomas More (writer of Utopia), Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Montaigne, Cervantes, Luís de Camões and Shakespeare.
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