The Renaissance was born in Florence at the dawn of the fifteenth century. Not many people dispute that. How and why that happened when and where it did is much more debated. In “The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World” (2003) bohemian author Paul Robert Walker argues that…

The origins of the Italian Renaissance have been debated since the mid-nineteenth century, but one thing is relatively certain: the Medici family of Florence had a lot to do with it. British novelist Paul Strathern tells the remarkable story of this remarkable family in “The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance” (2016).…

The term Renaissance is synonymous with art. Yet, in this brisk 127-page monograph on the Renaissance by professor Jerry Brotton from the University of London, art and the famed artists of the period play a very small role (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci appears just three times in the index, Raphael just four times). Brotton argues…

I’m usually quite reluctant to read non-fiction books written in the nineteenth century or earlier. I’ve found that even enduring classics like “The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783” (1890) by Alfred Thayer Mahan and “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776) by Edward Gibbon to be painful slogs. Francis Parkman’s “Montcalm…