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Christine de Pizan was the most famous and important woman thinker and writer of the Renaissance era -
The king who finally won the 100 Years War for France and expelled the English, created the first French professional army that was directly loyal to the crown. -
Spain became a powerful and united kingdom for the first time when the monarchs of two of the Christian kingdoms were married in 1479, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon. -
As Charles’s successor, he managed to make the new taxes permanent. In other words, he converted what had been an emergency wartime revenue stream into a permanent source of money for the monarchy. -
Machiavelli was a "courtier," a professional politician, ambassador, and official who spent his life in the court of a ruler. -
Castiglione was the author of The Courtier, published at the end of his life in 1528, The Courtier was a guide to the nobles, wealthy merchants, high-ranking members of the church, and other social elites who served and schemed in the courts of princes: courtiers. -
Erasmus was an astonishingly erudite priest who benefited from both the traditional scholastic education of the late-medieval church and the new humanistic style that emerged from the Renaissance -
Almost from the beginning of his rule, Paul was on the offensive: he commissioned a report in 1536 to evaluate the possibility and necessity of reform, which concluded that there were numerous abuses within the Church that had to be corrected -
When it became clear that the split was permanent, the Church itself became much more hardline and intolerant. The subsequent reforms were as much about imposing a new internal discipline as they were in making membership appealing to lay Catholics. -
One social phenomenon that definitely benefited from both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations was literacy. Overall, literacy climbed to between 5 – 10% of the population by 1600 across Central and Western Europe. -
The Reformation and the Age of Discovery can be seen as extensions of the Renaissance because the Renaissance was a very influential time period that lasted centuries and was what most likely influenced the Reformation and Age of Discovery. People questioning the Church is what lead to the Reformation while the Columbus discovering the Americas wouldn't have even happened if it wouldn't have been for the influence to study math from the Renaissance period.