alt Hacker NewsWhile most folks have probably heard of "the" Renaissance:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance
it was not the first in history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...
There's a certain 'critical mass' of people and thinkers, as well as decent enough communications (roads, letters) to allow for collaboration, needed to achieve a flowering/growth of knowledge, and that was cut off by (amongst other things) the Black Death:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages
Alphonse X "The Wise". A Castillian king basically sanctioned a book on board games, from chess to a few less known ones with dice. Enough said. There's tons of difference between the 6th century and the 12th.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_de_los_juegos
This would blow out lots of Anglo-Saxon minds with a very bad depiction of Middle Ages compared to the modern era from Newton. But, IRL, it was all about a gradual modernization of thinking.
People didn't just became modern with the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution. It happened tons of stuff in between.