Usually portrayed as a period dominated by the extraordinary achievements of great men, Margaret L. King recasts the Renaissance as a more complex cultural movement rooted in a unique urban society that was itself the product of many factors and interactions, such as commerce, papal and imperial ambitions, artistic patronage, scientific discovery, aristocratic and popular violence, legal precedents, peasant migrations, famine, plague, invasion and other social factors. Together with literary and artistic achievements, therefore, today's Renaissance history includes the study of power, wealth, gender, class, honour, shame, ritual and other categories of historical investigation opened up in recent years. In this text, Professor King traces the diffusion of the Renaissance from Italy to the rest of Europe.