Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Renaissance was a European period of history and cultural movement at the end of the Late Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern era. It is defined variously as lasting from the 14th century to the 17th, or more narrowly as covering only the 15th and 16th centuries. It was characterized by the European rediscovery and revival of the literary, philosophical, and artistic achievements of classical antiquity.
The Renaissance was first centered in the Republic of Florence, then spread to the rest of Italy and later throughout Europe. Florence was one of many states of Italy, and historians have long debated why the movement began there rather than elsewhere. The Medici, a banking family and later ducal ruling house, are often credited with patronizing and stimulating the arts.
The Black Death hit Europe between 1348 and 1350 and nearly halved Florence's population in the year 1348. One theory holds that familiarity with death pushed 14th-century Italian thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth than on the afterlife. Land values fell by 30 to 40 percent across most of Europe between 1350 and 1400, raising the value of working-class labor and giving commoners more freedom.
Renaissance humanism was a method of learning rather than a single philosophy, focused on studying ancient texts in their original languages and judging them by reasoning and empirical evidence. Its education rested on the Studia Humanitatis: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric. Humanists aimed to create the uomo universale, a universal man combining intellectual and physical excellence.
The works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were regarded as artistic pinnacles much imitated by other artists. Sandro Botticelli, Donatello, and Titian were also notable, while Giotto di Bondone is credited with first treating a painting as a window into space. Filippo Brunelleschi formalized linear perspective and built the dome of Florence Cathedral.
From a single print shop in Mainz, Germany around 1440, the movable-type printing press spread to around 270 cities in Central, Western, and Eastern Europe and produced more than 20 million volumes by the end of the 15th century. It made scholarly books more widely accessible and let researchers consult ancient texts freely. Printing ended the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages and replaced it with a culture of documented, proliferating facts.
The Italian artist and critic Giorgio Vasari first used the term rinascita, meaning rebirth, in his book The Lives of the Artists published in 1550. The French word renaissance achieved popularity only in the 19th century, when French historian Jules Michelet defined it as an entire historical period in his 1855 work Histoire de France. The word is borrowed from French, where it means re-birth.