The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance

"In this extraordinarily rich and engaging book, John Hale has painted, on a grand canvas, what he calls "an investigative impression" of one of the highest points of European civilization : the flourishing, between 1450 and 1620, of the period we have come to call the Renaissance." "It was an age that, wrote Marsilio Ficino in 1492, "has like a golden age restored to light the liberal arts which were almost extinct : grammar, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, music." The book contains memorable descriptions of all of these. But Hale is not concerned simply with the arts : his interest is much wider. "[This] was the first age in which the words 'Europe' and 'European' acquired a widely understood significance. It saw the emergence of a new and pervasive attitude to what were considered the most valued aspects of civilized life. It witnessed the most concentrated wave of intellectual and cultural energy that had yet passed over the continent ... It was also a period in which there were such dramatic changes of fortune for better of worse - religious, political, economic and, through overseas discoveries, global - that more people than ever before saw their time as unique, referring to 'this new age, ' 'the present age, ' 'our age'; to one observer it was a 'blessed age, ' to another, 'the worst age in history."'" "Hale paints his picture with an astonishing multiplicity of themes, people, and ideas. How did Europeans see themselves and others? What united them and.