Renaissance?

Question:How did innovation and reform during the renaissance, refomation, and age of exploration change life in europe?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: How did innovation and reform during the renaissance, refomation, and age of exploration change life in europe?

First of all, it broke the stranglehold of the Church. It fostered a commercial spirit in the cities, an independent and secular life. It brought about an intellectual and moral revolution, that man may think and investigate and satisfy his thirst to know without endangering the welfare of his soul. It reformed education.
With the ushering in of the age of exploration, it made the populations see beyond their own cities to the vast lands that were there "for the taking". Men were no longer bound to the small area of settled land, they were looking to having a freedom they couldn't express any other way than to be "pioneers" in a new land. Discovery was important!

Not significantly. More dramatic changes in the day-to-day lives of most individuals occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Aidan's conventional answer seems to come from what is taught about these periods in the public schools...it's an over-simplification made with rose-colored glasses.

The MOST significant change that occurred in Europe and elsewhere, a change that blots out any other changes in the history of the West, including the changes mentioned by Aidan, happened when Europeans came to understand, in the century prior to the two World Wars, that technological and scientific progress did not necessarily accord with the improvement of mankind in the higher sense: the innovations, reforms, and explorations could just as easily be for ill rather than the good of man. Dark motivations of individuals remain independent of the "broken stranglehold of the Church", greater availability of education, and misleading feelings of power that come from conquest of newly discovered territories.

What's interesting is that the change I'm calling attention to comes from a sobre awareness of History that can be learned through rational methods established well before the Renaissance. It is not coincidental that similar evidence of the same sort of "loss of faith" can be discerned in the final moments and artifacts of the historical period called...

Classical Greece