the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The natural world placed the center existence and aside man and the world. The Renaissance was movement that began in Italy the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific the medieval into the nature secular academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though matters took center stage. In the medieval model, tion and authority, not individual inquiry were key. But in full Faustus considers and this way thinking. for Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest in knowledge, wealth, and power. The play's attitude toward the clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Da notes, he keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation i the price of human pride Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it tempting to see in Faustus as many readers have a hero of the new modern world, a free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, this reading suggests, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus's pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.