Renaissance, the name given to the revolution in literature and art in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, caused by the revival of the study of ancient models in the literature and art of Greece and Rome, especially the former, and to the awakening in the cultured classes of the free and broad humanity that inspired them, an epoch which marks the transition from the rigid formality of mediæval to the enlightened freedom of modern times.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Rémusat, Charles, Comte de * Renaix