Power and imagination: City-states in Renaissace Italy

Challenging the accepted chronologies of the Renaissance, this study of life in the influential city-states of Italy shows how this cultural flowering was born in two phases. The first extended from the leven century to about 1300, the secon from the late thirteenth to the late sixteenth centuries. In the first period, social energies -economics, politics, a vibrant demography- were primary and foremost; in the second, cultural energies seemed to dominate.