We are presently in the grip of the largest and grandest renaissance that the world has ever seen. This should come as no surprise. When we use the phrase, "the Renaissance", we generally mean the renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Actually The Renaissance was invented in the nineteenth century. Until then, people didn´t think in those terms: we had no word for it. Apparently, it took two and a half centuries for people to recover from that cultural convulsion sufficiently to discover a need for the word.