When I was a teenager, I lived for a while in a city called Pécs, in southern Hungary. I walked to school every day through the ivy-covered courtyard of a convent and a basilica, passing under the nose of a statue of Janus Pannonius, a famous Hungarian poet from the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a time of great creation. Poets, artists, sculptors, musicians, architects - so many of the greats emerged in the 1400s. It was a period that followed the Dark and Middle Ages, kno