Voltaire was banished to England by King George I for his anti-religious and anti-government propaganda. While in England he honed his style, met a lot of important figures and eventually returned to France.

Voltaires only aspirations is that he wanted to be a writer. He started writing poems and eventually for the theater, but always found himself rubbing the law the wrong way finding himself in prision.

Intellectuals, while the their contributions may have been great to the Renaissance movement, church leaders felt their religious connections to be complete Heresy.

Pseudoscience came into vogue in the Middle Ages, quickly catching up to real scientific exploration which signified the time. Scientists like da Vinci were dissecting human bodies resulting in great physiological advances in medicine.

England lagged behind in the Renaissance but things quickly changed when Henry Tudor became the new king. Theatre’s started to be built in England , and the professions of acting and screenwriting took hold and Shakespeare was part of this.

The slave trade started, Columbus explored, raped, pillaged, killed and claimed , many new lands were discovered with the drop of a flag all of which Portugal was a world leader at this time. For the most part, women of all classes were repressed from education but this did change in the later part of the Renaissance for women of nobility. Galileo a polymath, developed the telescope and microscope and started charting the heavens.

France was a late comer to the Renaissance, a king and queen are wed and Huguenots were expelled. Art, particularly oil painting migrated to the Low Countries and Classical sheet music was transformed with the printing press. The Medici family fell from grace as leaders of a town they created, Florence.

Copernicus began thinking outside the box, with theory and experimentation causing conflict with the Catholic Church. It then saw the rise Martin Luther with new humanist ideologies

The 17th century brought about artists Jan Van Eyec and Rogier van der Weldon from the Netherlands developing new types of painting pigments. Leonardo da Vinci, a Polymath took paintings to new heights with the new colors and pigments available. Another Polymath, Italian Michelangelo while his preferred medium was in marble, began sculpting fakes from an earlier time.

In the 15th Century scrolls and books began to be produced, leading to the foundation of many universities and colleges. The Medici family became powerful and rulers of Florence, embracing art, while setting up the ledger-system for doing business, they farther stretched their influence by marrying into the French aristocracy.