As a cultural movement, the Italian Renaissance affected only a small part of the population. Italy was the most urbanized region of Europe, but three quarters of the people were still rural peasants. For this section of the population, life remained essentially unchanged from the Middle Ages.
Although I enjoyed the book, The Hellbound Heart, the movie version, Hellraiser - with the awesomely cheesy blue and yellow 80's FX - is a bit better and mainly because it was more fully realized.
Pagan author Raymond Buckland said in his 2002 book, The Witch Book, that the Charmed Book of Shadows gave the show an air of authenticity and showed that the producers of the show seemed to at least know a little of what they were talking about when depicting wiccan practices.