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 <i>Companion</i> 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 <i>Companion</i> 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.

• Provides a panorama of the field, encouraging students of any single area within Italian Renaissance studies to think in terms of a wide range of other potentially relevant areas
• Includes essays by North American, British and Italian scholars, both established and emerging; providing a heterogeneous set of tools with which to understand the period
• Extends the geographical parameters of Italian Renaissance studies, taking into account other areas of the Italian peninsula, including the South, once considered peripheral to the study of this period