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.
Gunn, with the taste of a Bidart or Ginsberg, writes about a serial killer and necrophiliac Jeffrey Dahmer (Troubadour), child abuse (A Los Angeles Childhood), rape (Arethusa Raped), childhood trauma (A Home), online sex services (The Search), and his mother's suicide (The Gas-poker).