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.
A Wizard of Earthsea is fantasy: it takes place in another world where magic exists and dragons are real. It's a coming-of-age story: Ged grows up from a child to a man. And it's a quest story for most of the book: Ged's major goal from Chapter 4 to the end is to stop his shadow from hurting anyone.