This book offers a rich and exciting new way of thinking about the Italian Renaissance as both a historical period and a historical movement. Guido Ruggiero's work is based on archival research and new insights concerning social and cultural history and literary criticism, with a special emphasis on everyday culture, gender, violence, and sexuality. The book offers a vibrant critical study of a period too long burdened by anachronistic and outdated ways of thinking about the past. Familiar, yet alien; pre-modern, but suggestively post-modern; attractive and troubling, this book returns the Italian Renaissance to center stage in our past and in our historical analysis.
Guido Ruggiero has published more than two dozen books on the Renaissance and related topics including, most recently, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in Renaissance Italy (2007) and The Blackwell Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (2002). He is an elected member of the Ateneo Veneto and has been a Fellow or Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Harvard's Villa I Tatti in Florence and the American Academy in Rome.
