Italian Renaissance

Anton here :

A fad for blowing huge chunks of the family fourtune on nice art, country houses and general good living.

Brought on by a lack of good other places to put your money, due to a sustained commercial crisis combining a trading depression in the Meditteranean and a fall in interest rates (down to 0.25% pa in Florence).

The period also saw a 'culture war' between the Humanists and the Scholastics, and as the Humanists concentrated on winning the argument rather than having their facts and logic straight, they successfully painted the 'moderns' (ie the Scholastics) as backward relics of the dark medieval era ... and therefore the Humanists got all the cool jobs as Court Poets, Historians and so on.

Mistaken for an intermediate period between the medieval and modern worlds by nineteenth century historians esp Burkhardt ...