Respecting pensions and light-houses, we have a voluntary surrender to the nation of the obligations incurred by the States in caring for their veterans or in promoting commerce. The monograph throws much light upon a neglected period of our history. E. K. Y. European History in the Secondary School D.C. KNOWLTON, PH.D., Editor. THE RENAISSANCE. What Was the Renaissance? Before opening the discussion with the class there should be a clear conception in the mind of the teacher as to what the Renaissance really was. Is it to be regarded, for example, as an era, embracing within its limits the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Schism, the Hundred Years’ War, the struggle for Italy and the rise of Spain, and ending finally with Luther’s attack on the Church in the sixteenth century; or is it to be restricted to a narrower field, marked largely by a revival of art, literature, and science and followed by an age of discovery? “The period of the Renaissance,” says one writer, “in its proper and most comprehensive meaning, may be regarded as the age in which the social and political system of the Middle Ages came to an end, in which medieval restrictions upon liberty of thought and inquiry were abolished.” He then proceeds to explain that it includes all the events which lie between 1273 and 1494, or, in other words, two centuries and a quarter of European development. A little further on, however, he refers to the “two movements with which the Renaissance has been preeminently and sometimes exclusively associated--the revival of letters and the revival of art,”[2] and discusses it from this second point of view, showing how even with this narrower conception of the movement it may properly include the reform of religion, the extension of geographical knowledge and new discoveries in the realms of science, both these conceptions were evidently before the minds of the committee of the New England History Teachers’ Association as they framed their syllabus. The efforts of the secondary teacher must of necessity be confined to the Renaissance as a revival of letters and art. This does not preclude the teacher from regarding the events from 1273 to 1494 as symptoms of changes which were bringing the Middle Ages to a close and inaugurating a new era. In fact, these events may serve as an introduction to the Renaissance proper, as has already been shown.[3]