🌊 Ripple · counterfactual
What if the Italian Renaissance had gone differently?
1400 · italy
Florence and its rivals fund a deliberate revival of classical art, architecture and learning.
If it had gone differently: Europe never rediscovers the classical world on its own terms; the break with the medieval mind comes later and shallower.
What it set up
- 1440Gutenberg's printing press, Books stay hand-copied and rare; literacy spreads at a crawl for another century.
- 1517The Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity stays a single church; no confessional map of Europe forms.
- 1600The Scientific Revolution, Natural philosophy stays deferential to the ancients; no method, no acceleration.
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