The Italian Renaissance was a period of intense cultural transformations when the ancient world was being rediscovered and a New World had been literally discovered. Between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, traditional beliefs were being challenged as people across the Italian Peninsula explored new ways of thinking about religion, politics, and society and introduced startling innovations in the arts.
This book contains more than hundred selections of primary sources-the historian-s raw material in the form of memoirs, letters, treatises, sermons, stories, poems, drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Here are eyewitness accounts of cold-blooded murders, lavish court pageants, the Sack of Rome, and the Black Death; first views of Michelangelo-s Sistine frescoes and glimpses of the surface of the moon through Galileo-s telescope. These sources bring the reader into direct contact with the creators of the great Renaissance works of art, literature, philosoph
