While I agree that, for the most part, the perception of the Renaissance is total tosh and that Renaissance propaganda is maybe two-thirds of the reason for most people's understanding of late antiquity and the early medieval period sucking cock, there was an economic discontinuity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, pretty directly linked to the Black Death. You can call what it spawned the "Renaissance" or you can reserve that term for the late medieval/early modern Italian cultural experience from Giotto onward, but it's there and it's real.Hear, hear! As a practicing medievalist, I am rather tired of people thinking that Renaissance was a sudden break, instead of a continuation and evolution. If you look at the intellectual traditions, you can see a clear line from thought development. Likewise with economics and other parts of society. The reason why this ridiculous canard came about is because of the arrogance of the Renaissance thinkers wising to cloak themselves in antiquity and Reformation-era propaganda against the medieval theologians.