Nicolaus Copernicus Prussia also resisted the Polish crown's efforts for greater control over the region. "Encyclopædia Britannica", "Encyclopedia Americana", "The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia", "The Oxford World Encyclopedia", and "World Book Encyclopedia" refer to Copernicus as a "Polish astronomer". Sheila Rabin, writing in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", describes Copernicus as a "child of a German family [who] was a subject of the Polish crown", while Manfred Weissenbacher writes that Copernicus's father was a Germanized Pole. There are additional arguments for Kopernik's Polish descent on his father's side. Kopernik's Y-DNA haplogroup, R1b L51, is found in southern Poland (in Silesia, where his father
Renaissance Renaissance The Renaissance (, ) is a period in European history, covering the span between the 14th and 17th centuries and marking the transition from the middle ages to modernity. Some historians focus more on the medieval aspects of the Renaissance and argue that it was an extension of the medieval period; others focus more on its modern aspects and argue that it was a break with the past. The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its own invented version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of