In reading early sixteenth-century French texts, it does not take long to realise that writers were aware of a break with the medieval past. If they do not quite use the word ‘Renaissance’, they come close to it in many of the expressions they adopt to describe the educational and cultural changes in which they are participating. While Vasari may have been the first to use the term ‘rinascita’ in the Preface to his Lives of the Artists to refer to the recovery of the beauty and purity of the visual arts along classical principles, in northern Europe it was the world of education that was more directly affected by the rediscovery of the classical heritage. In some senses, then, when scholars talk about the Renaissance, there are two connected but distinct phenomena: the Italian Renaissance, celebrated and defined in the nineteenth century by the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, and the northern Renaissance, accompanied by a move to religious as well as cultural reform. Occupying geographically and culturally an intermediate space between the two domains, France was able to benefit from both of them, to produce its own version of the Renaissance.

It is unsurprising that the term ‘rebirth’ should first have been applied in the field of the visual arts rather than of literature: the difference in kind between, say, Michelangelo's tondo of the ‘Holy Family’ in the Uffizi, with its emphasis on the human form, the dramatic pose of the central figures, the classically inspired ephebes in the middle ground, and a medieval painting of the Virgin and child is obvious even to the untutored eye.