This chapter defines the nature of the Italian Renaissance as a cultural movement stemming from, but not defined by, a new, fascinated engagement with classical Roman and Greek culture. It locates the origins and primary contexts of this movement in the fiercely emulative and precociously urbanized mercantile city-republics of late-medieval central and northern Italy and their fourteenth and fifteenth-century successors, the Italian signorie or princely courts. The chapter also considers the periodization of the movement, arguing for a ‘long’ Renaissance, extending down to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and hence incorporating the age of the Counter-Reformation. A longer Renaissance enables us to better understand the effects of important developments such as the introduction of printing and the rise of the vernacular to rival Latin as a literary language. These factors, over time, changed the demographics of Renaissance culture, opening it to less elite strata of society and to women.