What is a renaissance?

Question

What is a renaissance?

Answer 1

The term "renaissance" comes from the French, for "Rebirth."

It was most famously employed by French historians to describe the period between roughly 1400 and 1550 in Italy, a period which saw rapid and marked changes in art, literature and society in the city-states there.

While this is the best-known application of the term, it is often applied to other examples of rapid cultural change and flourishing of art, such as New York's "Harlem Renaissance" of the early twentieth-century, a major literary, musical and artistic movement in African American culture.

Many historians and literary critics today debate the usefulness of the term, since (they argue) it tends to overemphasize change between historical periods and cultural movements.  In other words, it can be overly reductive giving people the sense that things changed spontaneously and radically, overnight.

Answer 2

It is a time period and it is also a chain of Marriott hotels.