Summary

In this deft recasting of the Renaissance story, Margaret L. King weaves together the many strands that made up this complex cultural movement. By marrying the best of earlier scholarship with more recent research, King shows how Renaissance history is today as much about the study of power, wealth, gender, class, honour, shame, ritual, and other categories of investigation as the literary and artistic achievements of a uniquely urban society that spread from Italy to the rest of Europe. Ultimately, she points to the multiple ways in which this seminal epoch influenced the later developments of Western culture and society.