This volume brings together some of the most exciting renaissance scholars to suggest new ways of thinking about the period and to set a new series of agendas for Renaissance scholarship.

• Overturns the idea that it was a period of European cultural triumph and highlights the negative as well as the positive.
• Looks at the Renaissance from a world, as opposed to just European, perspective.
• Views the Renaissance from perspectives other than just the cultural elite.
• Gender, sex, violence, and cultural history are integrated into the analysis.

Guido Ruggiero is Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Miami. His previous publications include Binding Passions: Tales of Magic Marriage and Power at the End of the Renaissance (1993), The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985), and Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (1980). He has also edited two series of books: Studies in the History of Sexuality and Selections from Quaderni Storici.