Hay, Denys.

The century before the Reformation in Italy has generally been treated with either neglect or recrimination. Protestants tended to see the Church becoming ever more corrupt; Roman Catholics assumed that it was 'paganised' by the Renaissance. Indisputably it was becoming more Italian in its leadership. This book attempts a dispassionate survey of the popes and the clergy of the peninsula during the hundred years prior to Luther and the Sack of Rome. There is no book in Italian (or in any other language) which tries to describe what the Italian clergy and their parishioners were like at this time. The resulting picture will perhaps offend traditionalists; it will give no comfort to 'modernists'. It aims to be about 'life as it was lived'. There are many saints and sinners, and if there are more of the latter, there always are in history books, for that is how the historian invariably finds his material.

"Counter Professor Hay provides a clear picture of what the Renaissance was, what it meant and how it spread. He shows the Renaissance as a growing and changing series of attitudes and ideas, rooted firmly in the general history of the period, and not as a static and isolated phenomenon. Most current ideas of the Italian Renaissance are derived from Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860. Professor Hay provides a completely fresh appraisal which goes back to the basic texts, to the great monuments of art and architecture, to the men - Boccaccio, Petrarch and the others - and their achievements: the essence of which historical movements are made. He has taken note of recent Italian scholarship and provides a fresh and readable account of one of the great epochs in European history. There is no other book in English, except the translation of Burckhardt, which embraces the political history of the Renaissance period as well as the history of art and ideas. The book will appeal to the general reader as well as to students of history and art. In this second edition, which has been revised and brought up to date by the author, a more ample treatment of the 'reception' of the Renaissance in England is given in the concluding chapter."