Defend or Refute - "The Renaissance was a new development, strikingly different from the preceding Middle Ages." - This essay agrees with this quote, and gives many reason as to why.

Was the Renaissance a new development or was it just a continuation of the Middle Ages? The Renaissance was a new development completely different from the middle ages. Even though many scholars claim that much of the ideas of the Renaissance came from the middle ages and that their were many progressive changes during the middle ages, the Renaissance had enough unique qualities to justify itself as a completely separate period of time in history. …

…Burckhardt's thesis, in which he states that the Renaissance was a completely new development, separate from any other time period before it. Without the Renaissance the world as we know it today would not exist. We probably would be working on some type of farm, under a dictatorship government in which we would not have any power. So unless you want that to happen, lets learn from the past, and try to better the future.