Around the year 1500, the ancient maritime republic of Venice surpassed all the other states of renais-r sance Italy in wealth and power. For nearly a thousand years, the Venetians had enjoyed continual economic and political success, transforming their original scattered settlements on the lagoon islands into the splendid capital of an empire extending from the Greek islands to the rich cities of Lombardy. The patrician ruling caste of the republic consequently thought of itself as invincible and so was completely unprepared for the disastrous events of the war of the League of Cambrai.

There are two major problems in renaissance science, each of which has a cultural, as well as a scientific, dimension. The first problem concerns the impact of humanism upon the science of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is often claimed that the humanist influence was malign: by attacking scholastic thought, the humanists tried to interrupt the steady evolution of modern science from its medieval scholastic form to the more advanced structure of Galileo. A necessary foundation of this claim is, of course, the internal history of science argument, known as the Duhem thesis, which holds that the main ancestry of Galileo's thought is indeed the scholastic natural philosophy of the Middle Ages.

Henri Hauser has stated clearly the central historical contribution of the sixteenth century. Stressing that the century saw many new developments as an age of discovery and invention, he goes on to write: ‘D'autre part la révolution intellectuelle du XVIe siècle est, au moins dans son aspect extérieur, un retour à l'antiquité. Retour à la nature, sans doute, mais telle que l'ont vue at interprétée les anciens. Le xvie siecle nous apparaît d'abord comme tourne moins vers l'avenir que vers le passé, vers deux passés qui lui semblent également vénérables, l'antiquité paienne et l'antiquité judéochretienne, l'lliade et l'Évangile. Renaissance et Réforme sont au debut deux mouvements parallèles et de même sens, l'un pour retrouver sous les gloses la réalité de Thumanisme antique, l'autre pour restituer en sa purete le christianisme primitif. Là où nous serions tentés de voir une revolution il y aurait, en réalité, deux restaurations.’

The story of the exposure of the Donation of Constantine is a familiar one. In the middle of the fifteenth century, it will be recalled, two different men, writing independently of each other in England and in Italy, demonstrated conclusively that the document was a forgery. Others had long suspected it and, on one occasion at least, carefully examined and rejected it. But it was left to Reginald Pecock and Lorenzo Valla to complete the criticism. When they were finished it was difficult, if not impossible, to continue to believe in either the document or the event. In this way, European historiography took a major step forward and the Renaissance relieved itself of one of the many legends that cluttered its understanding of the past.

Homas More ‘read for a good space a public lecture of St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, in the Church of St. Lawrence in the Old Jewry’ shortly after his appointment about 1501 as Utter Barrister in Lincoln's Inn. Stapleton tells us that More's lectures did not treat The City of God ‘from the theological point of view, but from the standpoint of history and philosophy’; but Stapleton is relatively late (1588), and it is unclear whether he was rather inferring from More's situation as a layman and a common lawyer than speaking out of any real knowledge of the content of More's lectures. The lectures are not extant, but Stapleton's report together with the humanists’ anti-intellectualistic bias helps to shape conjecture on their character; Chambers thought they ‘may have embodied some of the criticism of social evils which More later put into Utopia’.

The diffusion of the Renaissance in Ireland was in fact late. But to say of Ireland that ‘She was practically untouched by the renaissance’, as one authority of fifteenth-century Ireland has, is an overstatement. It will be the thesis sustained here that when it reached what Tasso called divisa dal mundo ultima Irlanda it had a powerful impact, both culturally and politically. It came principally as an adjunct of the new religious ferment. In Europe the Reformation preceded the Counter-Reformation; in England they synchronized, but in Ireland the Counter-Reformation was established before the Reformation had made any real headway. Religious issues were strongly colored by the new learning, so that the religio-cultural conflicts in Ireland were sharper than anywhere else in the British islands.