The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance

The Renaissance in Italy continues to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination and on scholarly enquiry. This Companion presents a lively comprehensive interdisciplinary and current approach to the period that extends in Italy from the turn of the fourteenth century through the latter decades of the sixteenth. Addressed to students scholars and non-specialists it introduces the richly varied materials and phenomena as well as the different methodologies through which the Renaissance is studied today both in the English-speaking world and in Italy. The chapters are organized around axes of humanism historiography and cultural production and cover a wide variety of areas including literature science music religion technology artistic production and economics. The diffusion of the Renaissance throughout Italian territories is emphasized. Overall the Companion provides an essential overview of a period that witnessed both a significant revalidation of the classical past and the development of new vernacular and increasingly secular values.