This new, compact, up-to-date text presents a comprehensive view of the Renaissance, stressing its roots in Italy--a region that never lost contact with its Roman past. The text demonstrates how the Italian phase of the Renaissance reached into the rest of Europe and how it preconditioned later aspects of European civilization--religious reform, global encounters, the Scientific Revolution, the controversy over womens roles--that do not belong strictly to the Renaissance.

A native New Yorker, Margaret L. King was graduated from Sarah Lawrence College (BA, 1967) and Stanford University (MA, 1968; Ph.D. 1972). At Brooklyn College, CUNY, since 1972, and the Graduate Center since 1987, she has taught courses in the Italian Renaissance, the history of childhood, early modern women, the humanist tradition, early modern historiography, the early modern city, and ancient Greece and Rome. She has published four books on different aspects of the culture of Renaissance Italy: The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (Chicago, 1994); Women of the Renaissance (Chicago, 1991); Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, 1986); Her Immaculate Hand, ed. and trans., with Albert Rabil, Jr. (MRTS 1983, 2nd ed., 1992). In addition, her single-authored textbook Western Civilization: A Social and Cultural History, is published by Prentice Hall (2nd ed., 2003). Her edition and translation (with Diana Robin) of the works of Isotta Nogarola is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in fall 2003, and her single-authored textbook The Renaissance in Europe from McGraw Hill in 2004. In addition, she has published over 30 articles, essays, review essays and reviews. She served as Executive Director of the Renaissance Society of America from 1987 through 1995, and book review editor of Renaissance Quarterly from 1997 to 2002. She was a member of the editorial board for the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, published by Scribners in 2000 and winner of the Dartmouth Prize for that year; and is currently co-editor (with Albert Rabil, Jr.) of the series “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” (texts by and about women, published by the University of Chicago Press) of which twenty volumes are published; 48 additional titles are in the pipeline. Her current research project is a study of mothers and sons in history (anticipated completion 2006).

1. Italy and Rome: From Roman Republic to Secondo Popolo (c.500 B.C.E.-1300 C.E.)

2. An Age of Republics (c.1250-c.1350)

3. Human Dignity and Humanist Studies: the Career of Humanism (c.1350-c.1530)

4. New Visions (c.1350-c.1530)

5. At Home and in the Piazza (c.1350-c.1530)

6. The Church and the People (c.1350-c.1530)

7. Statecraft and Warcraft (c.1350-c.1530)

8. The Crisis and Beyond (c.1500-c.1650)

9. The Renaissance and the Two Reformations (c.1500-c.1650)

10. The Renaissance Beyond the Alps: Cities, Courts, and Kings (c. 1500-c.1700)

11. The Renaissance and New Worlds (c.1500-c.1700)