>>11461073>a pisswater kingdom ruled by a tiny lordship is still a monarchy is it notKinda. Think of how Britain is a monarchy today. Medieval monarchs were more like symbolic leaders and religious figures, but to your average dude, it didn't matter at all who the king was. It wasn't until absolutism arose that monarchs started playing a big part in people's lives. Aside from leadership in times of war, monarchs were virtually irrelevant in the Middle Ages.
>isn't the renaissance when all those enlightening figures started showing up?You mean "enlightening figures" as in the Enlightenment? Because the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were two very different things (although the Enlightenment was influenced by Renaissance Humanism). Renaissance was about the discovery of the New World, some gay dudes painting and making sculptures in Italy, some dude inventing a printing press in Germany, rich dudes paying for people to do cool things, monarchs getting more powerful and lots of breakthroughs in all sorts of fields. It happened between the 14th century and the 16th century (although there is some debate about it). The Enlightenment, on the other hand, was a philosophical movement from the 17th and 18th century, and that's where you had the rationalism vs empiricism debate, and the philosophers REEEEEEing about the church and despotism
