THE RENAISSANCE! The "period" was described in a scholarly matter by the Swiss scholar Burckhardt. He described the period as a radical break from what came before and the birth of modernity. He essentially "fell for" Petrarch's rhetoric. Scholars now understand that the intellectual movements that gave rise to humanism and the like have roots deep in the Middle Ages and that the Renaissance is not a distinct time period so much as an intellectual movement that began in Italy and spread northwards as over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods.