The scientific renaissance is a very interesting topic. Most people think people before the renaissance were idiots but no they were just complicit. People were not inventing or discovering anything new. The renaissance was when that changed. Some people started to discover new things. Such as Galileo used his telescope and discovered that Jupiter had moons. That was a major discovery that made the theory of the sun center universe much more likely, but we will not go into that right now.
The common people before the scientific renaissance just followed the well-known smart people. After the renaissance more people started to become better educated and that lead to more innovation which became a snowball effect that eventually became modern day.