The Renaissance and the Wider World

Award-winning historian Joanne M. Ferraro's The Renaissance and the Wider World skillfully surveys the economic, political, social, and cultural history of Europe for the period between 1250 and 1600. The book examines how the Renaissance manifested itself through developments in the high culture of art, architecture, philosophy, science, technology, and education, as well as material culture in the form of worldly goods and consumption patterns. Ferraro expertly shows how Renaissance high culture began in 13th-century Italy, with important ancient and medieval legacies and cultural infusions from China, North Africa, and Islam and, from the 16th century, the Ottomans and the Americas; she also examines some of the ways in which this Renaissance then impacted the rest of Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire during the 15th and 16th centuries. Vital and innovative themes that permeate the text's discussions of science, art, architecture, philosophy, and technology are that: * Global encounters helped shape the material, intellectual and artistic cultures of the age * Both women and men contributed significantly to the advances made * The daily lives of ordinary men and women are fundamental to understanding this remarkable period Highly illustrated and with valuable pedagogical features, such as timelines and a glossary, The Renaissance and the Wider World is the essential guide to a European era of profound global importance.

Joanne M. Ferraro is Albert W. Johnson Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at San Diego State University, USA. She is the author of Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (2001), which won both the Helen and Howard R. Marraro Book Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Prize. She is also the author of Venice: History of the Floating City (2012), Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557- 1789 (2008) and Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650 (1993).

List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Boxes
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Invention of the Renaissance
1. Foundations: The Ancient and Medieval Legacies
2. Urban Revitalization and Political Organization: 1000-1350
3. Spheres of Culture: 1000-1375
4. Daily Life and Modes of Socialization
5. Fifteenth-Century Politics
6. Humanism and the Circulation of Knowledge
7. Fifteenth Century Art and Its Patrons
8. A Shifting World: Italy in the Sixteenth Century
9. Sixteenth-Century Cultural and Intellectual Life
10. Worldly Connections: the Renaissance Exchange
Glossary
Index