This period of musical history starts with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends with the rise of science and humanism in Italy in the late 1300s and early 1400s. It is a period where literacy was limited mainly to the clerical class so that today we know a lot about medieval religious music but much less about the secular music of the time. It is a profoundly important period for the future of European musical culture – the religious music of these centuries will embark on a new course, abandoning the monophony of the Greeks and Romans and exploring the new possibilities of polyphony.