Usually portrayed as a period dominated by the extraordinary achievements of great men, leading scholar Margaret L. King recasts the Renaissance as a more complex cultural movement rooted in a unique urban society that was itself the product of many factors and interactions. These included commerce, papal and imperial ambitions, artistic patronage, scientific discovery, aristocratic and popular violence, legal precedents, peasant migrations, famine, plague and invasion. Together with literary and artistic achievements, therefore, today's Renaissance history includes the study of power, wealth, gender, class, honour, shame, ritual and other categories of historical investigation opened up in recent years. Incorporating the most recent research, Professor King traces the diffusion of the Renaissance from Italy to the rest of Europe.

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Margaret L. King is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of several books, including the prize-winning Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance and Women of the Renaissance, as well as a textbook, Western Civilization: A Social and Cultural History.