History - Europe - Renaissance

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe's golden age. From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we're told) heralds the dawning of a new world--a halcyon...

Hernán Cortés's Cartas de Relacíon, written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, provide an extraordinary narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortés's journey to Honduras in 1525. Pagden's English translation...

A Seminary Co-op Notable Book PROSE Award in European History "Marvellously readable . . . Not for nothing is Grafton renowned as today's leading historian of Renaissance intellectual culture . . . as erudite as it is enchanting." --Literary Review "A brilliantly vivid exercise...

A fresh perspective on the early mafia as a means of resistance against invasion, this gripping history illustrates the previously unknown extent of these families' power in the 14th century. 1343: there is famine in Naples. After nightfall, a Genoese ship loaded with wheat...

A magisterial cultural history of the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus, ranging from the early shaping of the continents and the emergence of homo sapiens to the story of shipbuilding, navigation, maritime exploration, slavery, and nascent European imperialism. A dazzling and ambitious history of the...

The most detailed and comprehensive treatise on swordsmanship ever written. Gerard Thibault's Academy of the Sword offers an extraordinary glimpse into a forgotten landscape of ideas, in which Pythagorean sacred geometry illuminated the lethal realities of rapier combat to create one of the Western...

A rich, wondrous anthology of the Western magical tradition, from the Old Testament to Doctor Faustus and Paradise Lost, now in a Penguin Classics black spine edition ". . . as when iron is drawn to a magnet, camphor is sucked into hot air,...

"A marvel of storytelling and a master class in the history of the book"--Ernest Hilbert, Wall Street JournalThe bestselling author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling captures the excitement and spirit of the Renaissance in this chronicle of the life and...

The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. In the fiftieth...

A groundbreaking account of how firearms changed Europe and the world In Renaissance Italy, the gun was not only a tool of war but also a desirable object, a luxury item carried at court. Guns were in use on the battlefield by 1440; later...

A compelling, resource-rich history of the modern West--from the Renaissance to the present--designed for students and lifelong learners alike, and grounded in the enduring ideals of liberty, faith, and reason. This is Volume II of a two-part series tracing the story of Western civilization...

Beginning in the heady days just after the First Crusade, this volume--the third in the series that began with The History of the Ancient World and The History of the Medieval World--chronicles the contradictions of a world in transition. Popes continue to preach crusade,...

J.M. Roberts's renowned History of the World is widely considered the finest available one-volume survey of the major events, developments, and personalities of the known past, offering generations of readers a tour of the vast landscape of human history. In this new edition, Bancroft...

It was a dynasty with more wealth, passion, and power than the houses of Windsor, Kennedy, and Rockefeller combined. It shaped all of Europe and controlled politics, scientists, artists, and even popes, for three hundred years. It was the house of Medici, patrons of...

A myth-shattering view of the Islamic world's myriad scientific innovations and the role they played in sparking the European Renaissance. Many of the innovations that we think of as hallmarks of Western science had their roots in the Arab world of the middle ages,...

In this single indispensable volume, one of America's ranking scholars combines a life's work of research and teaching with the art of lively narration. Both authoriatative and beautifully told, THE MIDDLE AGES is the full story of the thousand years between the fall of...

A renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the dramatic tale of modern Europe's ascent.In The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe, Walter McDougall, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, provides readers with a sweeping historical...

Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat, historian and political theorist who wrote this book sometime around 1513. In 1512 the Medici's came to power and he lost his post in Florence. It is believed he wrote this book in an effort to win them over...

Machiavelli draws on his extensive historical knowledge and experience as a statesman to examine the reasons that Kings, Emperors, Dukes and governments have thrived or crumbled, while highlighting the principles that guided them. In each case Machiavelli suggests a set of principles that any...

Originally published more than forty years ago, this important collection--now revised and updated--brings together the works and writings of the revolutionary minds behind the Protestant Reformation and remains a major resource for teachers, students, and history buffs alike.Over the decades, modern scholarship has shed...