Permanent diplomacy, featuring resident ambassadors empowered to formally represent their sovereign state and bestowed with certain legal immunities, such as exemption from taxes, tolls, and custom duties, is a modern development tracing its origin back to the city-states of fifteenth century Renaissance Italy. Garrett Mattingly tells the story of these developments in “Renaissance Diplomacy” (1955),…

“The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance” (1955) by German-Jewish emigre Hans Baron is one of the most influential pieces of Renaissance history published in the last century. In it Baron introduces the term “civic humanism,” which has become a core element of contemporary Renaissance studies. While “Crisis” is a dazzling work of scholarship and…

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).…