It's important to note that when people engage in historical role play as a hobby they almost alway chose the age of faith (aka the dark ages, or the middle ages). In fact when someone says they do historical role play you can safely assume it's this period in particular they are playing around in. And there is a good reason for this. The age of faith is itself a time of fantasy. It's the time period where humanity decided to indulge its deeper fantasies about how the world works.

They paid a heavy price on earth for indulging themselves but they had the advantage of not knowing any better and modern role players have the advantage of returning to better at the end of the day. A chivalrous knight engaged in sword play on behalf of a beautiful women believing that if he got cut and died from infection he would be married to her in the afterlife. While the modern role player might do the same thing not because he perceives the same upside but because he perceives less downside.

The age of faith demonstrates the curse of knowledge. If asked what age we would like to be born in not many of us would pick the middle ages because we know we would suffer long and die short with no compensation to be gained after death. But if we could visit ourselves in that time we would find ourselves as happy if not happier than any other. Though those of us with less intellectual limitations might find the time period more spiritually limiting. For the age of faith had an answer for everything but not for everyone.

The age of faith was a boon to the common man and encouraged him to conquer nature and increase his number until nature made proliferation through procreation a profitless enterprise. But by filling every nook of nature with humanity we created a fertile field for trade and industry to grow.

Unfortunately, the saturation of nature also made the conquest of men more profitable than the conquest of yet more nature, and as a result the increase in trade amongst christians was accompanied by an increase of internal conquest until a Pope decided to redirect the will to conquer towards the Turks. The crusades were largely too poorly organised to succeed at their nominal goal but they left room for trade to continue to grow and had a minor side affect of exposing the christians to equivalent but alternative faiths and greek texts that opened their eyes to their own pre christianity history. Essentially, opening the christian mind to the possibility of things being differently good just as they were starting to accumulate wealth.

The place where this wealth accumulated the most was in Italy where the Catholic church pulled in the excess wealth of the surrounding nations and the central location of Italy within the Mediterranean gave it a natural advantage in the trade industry. And in turn the banking industry which needs just one good industry to base itself upon, since banks in some sense sell access to industry. The result was a group of wealthy business men that had excess wealth, which is in effect excess energy. These men then lavished their excess energy on their faith through the hands of artists. They knew no other place to put their energy. So it should be no surprise that the renaissance produced some of the best art ever produced. That's where all the most competent, and energetic people of the time spent themselves.

The term renaissance is french for rebirth. The rebirth it refers to is that of the Greeks/Romans. Which is odd for a christ obsessed people. But the Italians weren't as enamoured as the rest of the catholic world because they lived close enough to Rome to see how the sausage was made. And they felt the need to justify the rest of the worlds love of christianity by portraying it in it's highest glory. They drew inspiration from the greeks not because they doubted christianity but because they loved it and saw no problem with using greek icons to enhance the Christian experience.

However, this art only improved the pilgrimage experience for a short time. Eventually, the pilgrims started to doubt their indulgences were really helping them get into heaven and when the catholic church offered to make the pilgrimage process more efficient by transporting just the pilgrims money rather than his whole person to Rome, the provincial catholics started to wonder if it might be even more efficient to create a new church more conveniently located. The Protestants and Anabaptists broke away from the Catholic church and the Catholic, meaning universal, church ceased to live up to it's name after centuries of enjoying the monopoly it's name implies. It then reformed itself but it was too late. The church lost it's monopoly and in turn Italy lost an important revenue stream just as the Portuguese and Spanish were finding new trade routes around the world that broke Italys monopoly in that domain too. The renaissance was short lived because it fulfilled it's purpose just as the means that sustained it were being appropriated by other nations. Italy then served it's successors in the same role the Greece had served it. It provided the inspiration at a time when an excess of wealth (energy) needed it. However, inspiration is like a lightning rod. It dissipates built up energy down a safe predictable path. Storms are more interesting without lightning rods. But sometimes low energy storms pass without a strike and that's even less interesting. It's fun to consider what might have been if there had been no lightning rod. But it's not realistic. The Greeks themselves had their own lightning rods. So did the Sumerians and Indo Europeans before them. Being original is hard for the sane. And the sane are lazy so we must accept that the future unfold gradually by mixing in the new with the old.

Of course with christianity now having three factions and the Muslims thriving in the east you needed only indecisiveness to create a 5th faction. This is the humanists, later to become the atheists. And it's their feeble attempts at making sense of life that would create demand for the better ways of thinking offered by Francis Bacon in England and Pierre Gassendi in France. Who's work in metacognition became science when applied to real problems. And if we take the view that religion is a set of answers to the question of the meaning of life then we can say that science is a new religion for the intellectually gifted.