Seeking an overview of the European Middle Ages (probably around the 15th to 17th centuries)

The Middle Ages (also known as the Middle Ages; English: Middle Ages; c. 476-1453) was an era in European history (primarily Western Europe), counting from the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the period when the Eastern Roman Empire fell and nation-states rose.

The term "Middle Ages" was first used by humanists in the late 15th century. Europe during this period was not ruled by a strong and powerful regime. Feudalism brought frequent wars, resulting in the stagnation of science and technology and the development of productive forces, and the people lived in hopelessness and misery, so the Middle Ages or Early Middle Ages in Europe and the United States is commonly known as the "Dark Ages", which is traditionally regarded as the slower development of European civilization in the history of the period.

-------------------------------------So the era the owner is talking about is not exactly the Middle Ages----------------------------------

About the era the owner is talking about I searched:

Economics:

The economy during the Middle Ages was primarily a feudal, manorial, natural economy. A number of commercial cities emerged: Paris, Lyon, Tournai, Marseilles, Cologne, Trier, Strasbourg, Hamburg, Venice, Genoa, etc., forming a trade area centered on the Mediterranean.After the 16th century, there was the rise of workshop crafts, first in Florence and then in Flanders, and the enclosure movement led to rapid growth in England. This economic model accelerated trade, which led to the Great Geographic Discovery and the discovery of the New World of America. The artisanal industry also led to a quantum leap in the weapons used in warfare, with artillery and Mausers gradually replacing the swords of the knights and rendering the old castles defenseless. The artisanal industry also gave rise to a capitalist economy. By the middle and late Middle Ages, the various craft trades had evolved from individual operations to the formation of guilds, and the concept of "professionalism" was born during this period.

Culture:

The Renaissance, a cultural movement that took place between the 14th and 17th centuries. It originated in Florence in the late Middle Ages and spread to various European countries. The works of the Renaissance embodied humanist ideas: advocating the liberation of individuality, opposing the asceticism and religious views of the Middle Ages; advocating scientific culture, opposing obscurantism, and getting rid of the church's constraints on people's thinking; affirming human rights, opposing theocracy, and rejecting all the authority and traditional dogma as the basis of theology and scriptural philosophy; and embracing centralization of power and opposing feudalism, which were the main ideas of humanism. Humanism is the main idea of humanism. Among them, the representative works are: Dante's Divine Comedy, Boccaccio's Decameron, Machiavelli's Monarchism, Rabelais's Biography of the Giants, Campanella's The City of the Sun, and so on.

Renaissance art celebrated the beauty of the human body, asserting that human proportions are the most harmonious in the world, and applied it to architecture, with a series of paintings and sculptures that, though still featuring religious stories, showed scenes of ordinary people, pulling the gods down to earth.

Humanists began to study the Bible in the same way they had studied classical literature, translating it into national languages, leading to the rise of the Reformation movement.

Humanism glorified the secular and scorned the heavenly; it promoted rationality as a substitute for divine revelation; it affirmed that "man" is the creator and enjoyer of this world; it demanded that literature and the arts should express the thoughts and feelings of man, that science should work for the welfare of man, and that education should develop the human personality; it demanded that the thoughts, feelings, and intellect of man should be liberated from the constraints of theology. The promotion of freedom of individuality has thus played a great progressive role in the development of history.

Natural Sciences:

Astronomy: The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his Treatise on the Operations of the Heavenly Bodies in 1543, in which he put forward a system of heliocentrism that differed from Ptolemy's system of geocentrism. The Italian thinker Bruno claimed in his books On Infinity, the Universe, and the Worlds, and On Causes, Origins, and Unity that the universe is infinite in space and time, and that the sun is only the center of the solar system rather than the center of the universe. Galileo invented the astronomical telescope in 1609, published The Starry Messenger in 1610, and The Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus in 1632. The German astronomer Kepler, by studying the observational data of his teacher, the Danish astronomer Tigu, formulated the three laws of planetary motion in The New Astronomy of 1609 and The Harmony of the Worlds of 1619, determining that the planets orbited around the sun in elliptical orbits, and that such motions were unequal in speed.

MATHEMATICS: Algebra made important developments during the Renaissance, when solutions to third and fourth equations were discovered. The Italian Caldano published a formula for finding the roots of cubic equations in his work The Great Art, but the discovery of this formula is really due to another scholar, Tartaglia. The solution of the quadratic equation was discovered by Caldano's pupil, Ferrari, and is also recorded in the Great Art. In his work, Bomberry elaborated on the incommensurability of cubic equations, used imaginary numbers, and improved the algebraic notation popular at the time. Symbolic algebra was established by the 16th-century French mathematician Vedda. He published An Introduction to the Methods of Analysis in 1591, which systematized algebra and for the first time consciously used letters to represent unknowns and known numbers. In another of his works, On the Identification and Revision of Equations, Veda improved the solution of third and fourth equations and also established the relationship between the roots and coefficients of quadratic and cubic equations, which is known in modern times as Veda's theorem. Trigonometry also gained much momentum during the Renaissance. The German mathematician Reg Montanus's On Various Triangles was the first European work on trigonometry independent of astronomy. The book contains a systematic exposition of plane and spherical triangles, as well as a very precise table of trigonometric functions. Rheticus, a student of Copernicus, produced more sophisticated tables of trigonometric functions based on a redefinition of trigonometry.

Physics: In physics, Galileo discovered the three laws of the falling body, the throwing body and the vibrating pendulum through many experiments, which led to a new understanding of the universe. His student Torricelli proved air pressure through experiments and invented the mercury column barometer. French scientist Blaise Pascal discovered the law of propagation of pressure in liquids and gases. British scientist Robert Boyle discovered the law of gas pressure.

Physiology and medicine: The Belgian physician Vesalius published his book The Structure of the Human Body, which challenged Galen's doctrine of the Trinity. The Spanish physician Servette discovered the small circulatory system of blood, proving that blood flows from the right ventricle to the lungs and reaches the left ventricle through a tortuous route. The British anatomist William Harvey, through a large number of animal anatomical experiments, published "Theory of the Movement of the Heart and Blood" and other treatises, which systematically explained the law of blood movement and the working principle of the heart. He pointed out that the heart is the center of blood movement and the source of power. This major discovery made him the originator of modern physiology.

Geographic Discoveries: A revolutionary leap in navigation was made, and a series of long-distance voyages were undertaken by Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian explorers. The geographical discoveries made by Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan, among others, provided strong evidence for the theory of the Earth's circle.

Printing: The invention of the modern printing press by the German Gutenberg greatly reduced the price of printed materials and contributed to the popularization of knowledge

Renaissance Literature:

Also known as <Dialectal Literature>

Writers everywhere began to use their own dialects rather than Latin for their literary creations, which drove popular literature and injected a great number of literary works into a wide variety of languages, including novels, poems and poems. a great deal of literature, including novels, poems, essays, ballads, and plays.

In Italy, the "Three Masters of Letters" emerged in the early Renaissance. Dante Alighieri wrote many scholarly works and poems during his lifetime, the famous ones being The New Birth and The Divine Comedy. Petrarch was the originator of humanism and is known as the "Father of Humanism". He was the first to call for the revival of classical culture, proposing to oppose "theology" with "anthropology". Petrarch composed many beautiful poems, his masterpiece being the collection of lyrical sonnets known as the Song of Songs. Boccaccio was the founder of Italian national literature, and his masterpiece is the Decameron, a collection of short stories.

In France, the Renaissance movement was characterized by the formation of two factions: the aristocratic faction represented by the "Society of the Seven Stars" and the democratic faction represented by Rabelais. The "Poetry Society of the Seven Stars", represented by Lonza and Du Bellay, made outstanding contributions to the theory of language and poetry. They were the first to put forward the idea of unifying national languages, which promoted the development of French national languages and national literature. However, they rejected folk poetry and served only a few aristocrats. Fran?ois Rabelais was an outstanding humanist writer after Boccaccio and a representative of the democratic school of the French Renaissance. His biography of the Giants, composed in 20 years, is a work of realism in which reality and fantasy are intertwined, and occupies an important place in the history of European literature and education.

In England, the representatives are Thomas More and William Shakespeare. Thomas More was a famous humanist thinker and the founder of idealistic socialism. 1516 his Utopia, written in Latin, was the first work of idealistic socialism. Shakespeare was a gifted dramatist and poet, who, together with Homer, Dante and Goethe, is regarded as one of the four epoch-making writers of Europe. His works, with their complete structure, vivid plots, rich and refined language, and outstanding characters, centrally represent the highest achievement of European Renaissance literature, and have a far-reaching influence on the development of European realist literature.

In Spain, the most outstanding representatives are Miguel de Cervantes and Vega. Cervantes was a realist writer, dramatist and poet. He wrote a large number of poems, plays and novels, of which he is best known for the long satirical novel Don Quixote, which had a major impact on the development of European literature. Vega was a dramatist, novelist and poet, the founder of the Spanish national theater, known as "the father of Spanish theater". He is a rare prolific writer in the world, life *** created more than 2,000 plays, more than 600 have been handed down to this day, there are religious plays, historical plays, mythological plays, robes and swords, pastoral opera and other forms, y reflecting the social reality of Spain, loved by the masses. The most outstanding masterpiece is "Sheep Spring Village".

Painting:

The development of Renaissance painting centered on Italy. Among the most prominent Italian city-states of the Renaissance were Florence, Milan, Naples, Rome, and Venice. People had categorized the painters of the time into various schools of painting by region. Outside of Italy, the Renaissance painting trend also infected Germany and the Netherland in the north, as well as the whole of Europe. (See Chi Ke's A History of Western Art). Renaissance painting is best represented by the works of the Three Masters of the Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Other outstanding painters include Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and many others. Leonardo da Vinci's paintings are most notable for The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa (now in the Louvre), as well as his studies of animals, plants, machinery, and the first hand-drawn manuscripts of the human embryo (a significant portion of which is now in Windsor Castle's gallery in England). Michelangelo's paintings are represented by the frescoes in the Chapelle Sistine, where the central section of the roof contains important scenes from the Book of Genesis, and the Last Judgment is also represented in the Sistine frescoes. Raphael's paintings are represented by the Beautiful Lady Gardener, the Sistine Madonna, the Eucharistic Controversy, and the School of Athens, and Raphael was also involved in the design of the felted drawings, of which the manuscripts are still extant. In addition to the three masters, Botticelli's paintings also reached a certain level of sophistication, and his paintings are known for their "femininity" (see Fu Lei's "Twenty Lectures on the Masterpieces of the World's Fine Arts"). His masterpieces include Spring and The Birth of Venus, as well as The Slander. The Venetian master Titian, whose works are known for their splendor and richness, is represented by "The Penitent Magrinda" and "The Venus of Urbino". The paintings of the Renaissance outside Italy are equally remarkable. For example, the German Dürer, his paintings in the Italian Renaissance influence, but still maintain a distinctive German national characteristics, serious and meticulous, can be seen in its "Self-Portrait".