Robert Davis is professor emeritus of Italian Renaissance and pre-modern Mediterranean history at Ohio State University. He has studied Naples, Rome, Palermo, Venice, the Vatican, and Perugia, and mostly works on the lives of ordinary people and the values they cherished. His subjects have ranged from shipbuilders, bull fighters, and amateur boxers in Venice to the corsairs who terrorized the Mediterranean everywhere else. He has co-authored studies of Venice as the world's most touristed city and of Renaissance men and women. He has also been in a number of television documentaries, on shipbuilding, Carnival, and the Mediterranean slave trade, and is currently writing a textbook on the history of modern Europe.

The Renaissance burst forth in all its glory around 1500 and spread throughout Europe. This period of great creativity and productivity in the arts and sciences is illuminated in this book through the lives of more than ninety of its illustrious intellectuals, artists, literary figures, scientists, and rulers. Included are such major figures as Lorenzo and Catherine de’ Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Charles V, Luther, Columbus, Copernicus, and St. Teresa of Ávila, as well as lesser-known characters such as Antonio Rinaldeschi, “gambler and blasphemer”; Louise Labé, “the jousting poetess”; Dick Tarlton, “the queen’s comedian”; Veronica Franco, “courtesan and wordsmith”; and Catena, “rustler, robber, and bandit chief.”

Each section in this volume marks a chronological stage in Europe’s rebirth, tying the period’s intellectual currents to its political and social concerns and setting the context for the individual biographies.