The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance - Softcover

'A superb evocation of the Europe of the 'long 16th century,' wonderfully fresh and rich in its copious illustrative detail, full of innumerable delights. The book is the summation of John Hale's career as a historian, and as the crowning achievement of a master-designer whose richly fabricated works have given so much pleasure.' John Elliot, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford

‘This magnificent book is the product of a lifetime’s scholarship by someone with a quite irrepressible curiosity and prodigious breadth of reading... together witht he enviable gift of writing clearly and beautifully.’ TLS

‘John Hale has produced a vast and enthralling mosaic. Only someone who had devoted a lifetime to studying history, literature and the afrt of the 15th and 16th centuries could draw so effortlessly on what seems a limitless range of texts and illustrations. One cannot skim a single chapter without encountering unfamiliar details, elegant juxtapositions of visual and verbal argument, and anecdotes without end, each of which makes a novel and instructive point. His curiosity never fails, his learning constantly surprises, and the wit and energy of his style never flags.... Extraordinary.’ Anthony Grafton, LRB

The masterpiece of Britain’s leading Renaissance scholar, winner of the Time-Life Silver Pen Award and The Royal Society of Literature Award, beautifully reissued in Harper Perennial.

The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance is the most ambitious achievement of Britain's leading Renaissance historian. John Hale has painted on a grand canvas an enthralling portrait of Europe and its civilisation at a moment when 'Europe' first became an entity in the minds of its inhabitants.

John Hale's Renaissance has no compartments. His range is universal. With astonishing range and subtlety of learning, he paints a gigantic picture of the age, enlivened by a multiplicity of themes, people and ideas. It contains memorable descriptions of painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture and music, but Hale is not simply concerned with the arts. He examines the dramatic changes during the period in religion, politics, economics and global discoveries. And throughout his book he approaches the art of war and the art created for princes from the point of view of their impact on the imaginations, sensibilities and lives of ordinary people.