What inspired the creative impulses that we associate with the Italian Renaissance? The roots of many features of the Italian Renaissance can be found in a world of commerce, politics, faith, and culture that emerged during the Middle Ages. The world before and immediately after the arrival of plague in western Europe in 1347-48–shaped by ambitious merchants, a papacy absent from Rome, new experiments in politics– gave birth to a society that would ultimately see itself as being “reborn” in some fundamental sense at the dawn of an era that came to be known as the Renaissance. Here, Stanford history professor Paula Findlen presented "How the Renaissance Began” during the Humanities West 2015 Dawn of the Italian Renaissance program.