A good starting point for the study of Renaissance intellectual history is Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains, rev. ed. (1961), and Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (1965, reissued 1980). Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. from Italian (1965, reprinted 1975); and Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. ed. (1966), treat humanism as a civic ethos as well as a scholarly and educational movement; while Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vol. (1970), disproves the notion of humanism as primarily secular. Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (1961), provides information on the acknowledged founder of Renaissance humanism. Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (1983), is an excellent study of a figure second only to Petrarch in importance. George Holmes, Florence, Rome, and the Origins of the Renaissance (1986), revives an old thesis attributing the origins of the Renaissance to the age of Dante. Studies of humanist culture outside Florence include J.K. Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante (1966); John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (1983); Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (1985); Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (1987); and Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (1986). A lively revisionist view that challenges basic assumptions about the history of Renaissance humanism is presented in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (1986). Albert Rabil, Jr. (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vol. (1988); Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (1988); and Donald Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (1991), discuss the current state of studies on humanism.
The classic account of the development of diplomacy is Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955, reprinted 1988); the subject is also discussed in Joycelyne G. Russell, Peacemaking in the Renaissance (1986). Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (1974), is a study of war in the Renaissance. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (1965, reprinted 1984), provides the political and cultural context of the thought of two leading Renaissance political scholars. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), traces the Renaissance heritage to modern times. Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (1989), is a fresh, lively intellectual biography of the great Florentine.
Science and technology
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vol. (1979), and The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), make a strong case for the revolutionary impact of Renaissance print technology upon culture. The concept of a “scientific revolution” is upheld in such standard works as Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science: 1300–1800, rev. ed. (1957, reprinted 1982); I. Bernard Cohen, From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450–1800 (1980); and A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750, 3rd ed. (1983); while the continuities with medieval science are stressed in A.C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, 2nd rev. ed. (1959, reissued 1967). Feminist theorists have made some influential contributions to revisionist perspectives deploring the “triumphalism” with which scientific advance has been treated: for example, Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (1985); Margaret Jacobs and James Jacobs, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988); and Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989).
The Renaissance outside Italy
New areas of investigation in social history, including the history of the lower classes, women, the family, and popular religion, are exemplified in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (1974; originally published in French, 1966); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored, 3rd. ed. (1984); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975, reissued 1987); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978, reprinted 1988); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (1976); Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (1983); Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (1985); and Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987).
In religious history there has been a tendency to reconstruct the bridges between the late medieval and Reformation piety and thought. Among the most influential examples of this effort are Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (1963, reissued 1983); and Heiko Augustinus Oberman (ed.), Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought (1966, reissued 1981). Other important studies include Steven E. Ozment (ed.), The Reformation in Medieval Perspective (1971); and Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (1977). Another, not necessarily contradictory, tendency has been that of seeing the history of late medieval and Renaissance religion on its own terms, rather than as the prelude to the Reformation; this approach is taken by Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Augustinus Oberman (eds.), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (1974); and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (1984). An original and valuable, if sometimes debatable, overview is John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (1985). Donald Weinstein