Renaissance Lives

Fifteen brilliantly potted biographies of the Renaissance era's most creative and vivid figures, fascinating individuals who embody the hopes, discoveries, and struggles of an age that gave birth to the modern world. Their stories make us see anew the profound transformations of an entire era that took for its name a word meaning "rebirth." With Renaissance Lives , Theodore K. Rabb revives a tradition of writing that was often practiced by the historians of that astounding era: to tell the story of an age by examining the lives of those who lived it. Rabb's subjects are all people who felt change gather speed around them: from Titian and Galileo to Catherine de' Medici and John Milton. In their stories we see, above all, the powers of ideas to liberate, to enthrall, to provoke, and to resolve conflict. Renaissance Lives shows us the struggle , with its grave disappointments but also its extraordinary achievements that accompanied the creation of the world we recognize as our own.