Drawing together the latest research in the field, The Routledge History of the Renaissance treats the Renaissance not as a static concept, but as one of ongoing change within an international framework. It takes as its unifying theme the idea of exchange and interchange through the movement of goods, ideas, disease and people, across social, religious, political and physical boundaries.

Table of Contents

• List of illustrations
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: the Renaissance question - William Caferro
• Part I Disciplines and boundaries
• 1 The ‘economic’ thought of the Renaissance - Germano Maifreda
• 2 A makeshift renaissance: North India in the “long” fifteenth century - Samira Sheikh
• 3 “By imitating our nurses”: Latin and vernacular in the Renaissance - Eugenio Refini
• 4 Individualism and the separation of fields of study: Jacob Burckhardt and Ercole Ricotti - William Caferro
• 5 Riddles of Renaissance philosophy and humanism - Timothy Kircher
• Part II Encounters and transformations
• 6 Object lessons and raw materials - Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts
• 7 Imagination and the remains of Roman antiquity - William Stenhouse
• 8 Sporus in the Renaissance: the eunuch as straight man - Katherine Crawford
• 9 Heritable identity markers, nations, and physiognomy - Carina L. Johnson
• 10 Biondo Flavio on Ethiopia: processes of knowledge production in the Renaissance - Samantha Kelly
• 11 Traditions of Byzantine astrolabes in Renaissance Europe - Darin Hayton
• 12 Reading Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florence - Ann E. Moyer
• Part III Society and environment
• 13 Why visit the shops? Taking up shopping as a pastime - Susan Mosher Stuard
• 14 Throwing Aristotle from the train: women and humanism - Sarah Gwyneth Ross
• 15 Mechanisms for unity: plagues and saints - Samuel K. Cohn
• 16 Dead(ly) uncertainties: plague and Ottoman society in the age of the Renaissance - Nükhet Varlık
• 17 Mapping Florence and Tuscany - Nicholas A. Eckstein
• 18 Exercise and leisure: sport, dance, and games - Alessandro Arcangeli
• 19 War, entrepreneurship, and politics - Suzanne Sutherland
• Part IV Power and representation
• 20 From frontier principality to early modern empire: limitations and capabilities of Ottoman governance - Kaya şahi̇n
• 21 Commerce and credit in Renaissance Florence - Paul D. McLean and John F. Padgett
• 22 Against the fisc and justice: state formation, market development, and customs fraud - Corey Tazzara
• 23 Representations of the Florentine Republic at the royal court in the Kingdom of Hungary - Katalin Prajda
• 24 From the palazzo to the streets: women's agency and networks of exchange - Megan Moran
• Further reading