'A master historian of the Renaissance offers us a fascinating new means of understanding and appreciating Italy's cultural development in the period between the ancient and the modern world. This is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students across the disciplines as well as travelers off to explore the wonders of Italian civilization.' Joanne M. Ferraro, San Diego State University, ... Read moreand author of Venice: History of the Floating City 'At a moment when many social and cultural historians have turned away from the very idea of the Italian Renaissance altogether or, at most, reduced it to an elitist movement, Ruggiero's bold new synthesis calls on all of us to reconsider. Perhaps it still does make sense to think of the Renaissance as a decisive moment in the making of modern and even postmodern culture.' John Jeffries Martin, Duke University, North Carolina 'The most imaginative and compelling survey of the Italian Renaissance available now. Lively, informed and thought-provoking, it presents the newest research and the best of current approaches to literature and culture in a very readable style by a master historian at the top of his game.' Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto 'In this long book, Ruggiero rejects recent scholarship that has minimized the significance of the Italian Renaissance. Instead, he argues that the cities of Florence, Venice, and Milan enjoyed a distinct period of precocity over the rest of Europe between roughly 1300 and 1500 … A thorough and accessible introduction to northern Italian history during this important period. Summing up: recommended.' B. J. Maxson, Choice 'In The Renaissance in Italy I have discovered the sophisticated analytical survey that I have for some years wanted to prescribe for the 250 or so undergraduates who elect every year to study Renaissance Italy in my department at Sydney. Again and again Ruggiero presents complex problems as questions of the type that one can hear oneself posing to bright young students, such as whether non-elite women and men would have had any awareness of - let alone a stake in - the Rinascimento culture that is the subject of this excellent book. I am happy to confess that many of Ruggiero's artfully framed questions have got me thinking as well.' Nicholas A. Eckstein, Journal of Social History 'Providing a comprehensive and concise history of approximately three centuries is no small task. Guido Ruggiero's The Renaissance in Italy rises to the challenge, presenting readers with an intellectually ambitious, erudite and engaging narrative of Italy's social and cultural contours between 1250 and 1575. In the process, Ruggiero touches on the ways that we as scholars and students have excavated, told and re-told our stories of a period both contested and persistently figured as pivotal to the development of European modernity.' Sean Roberts, European History Quarterly Show Less