Bibliography: p229-240. - Includes index.

Pt. I. Humanism. Ch. 1. Introduction. 1. The historical situation in 1300. 2. Argument. Ch. 2. Concepts and Assumptions. Ch. 3. Humanitas. Ch. 4. The Sources of Humanitas. 1. The Socratic tradition. 2. The ideas of Cicero. Ch. 5. Petrarch and his Successors -- Pt. II. The Artist, the Patron and the Sources of Artistic Change. Ch. 6. Introduction. 1. The nature of the problem. 2. The character of artistic change in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. Ch. 7. Theories. 1. Older social interpretations : Antal. 2. Baxandall. 3. The theory of patronage. 4. The case of Isabella d'Este and Perugino's Battle of Chastity and Lasciviousness. 5. Wackernagel and Florence's contribution to art. Ch. 8. Artistic Innovation and the Artist's Relations with his Patron. Ch. 9. The Influence of Humanistic Ideas. 1. Ancient rhetorical ideas. 2. Pliny. 3. The motivation of patrons: the ideals of magnificence and 'magnanimity'. Ch. 10. Conclusions -- Pt. III. The Achievement of the Italian Renaissance. Introduction. Ch. 11. Man and Society. 1. An inherited idea of man, society and civilisation. 2. Individualism and the cult of creative personality. 3. Machiavelli and Castiglione. 3.1. Machiavelli. 3.2. Castiglione. Ch. 12. The Intellectual and the Ideal of Intellectual Cultivation. Ch. 13. Classical Scholarship. Ch. 14. Historiography. Ch. 15. Renaissance and Reformation. 1. Attitudes to the prince and the beginnings of the Reformation in Germany and England. 1.1. The problem : Luther's doctrines and their origins. 1.2. Luther's support. 1.3. The attitude of King Henry VIII. 2. Calvinism and the 'decline of magic'. 2.1. The thesis of Keith Thomas. 2.2. The Calvinist conception of God.

In The Italian Renaissance John Stephens interprets the significance of the immense cultural change which took place in Italy from the time of Petrarch to the Reformation, and considers its wider contribution to Europe beyond the Alps. His important new study (which is designed for students and serious general readers of history as well as the specialist) is not a straight narrative history; rather, it is an examination of the humanists, artists and patrons who were the instruments of this change; the contemporary factors that favoured it; and the elements of ancient thought they revived. Dr. Stephens shows how, following Petrarch's example, the humanists discovered a novel point of view in ancient ethics. It was expressed in a set of assumptions about the scope of free will, the place of man in society, and the work of the intellectual and artist. From the same source they revived a method of induction by which such issues could be analysed. All this, as the book explains, had a powerful impact on political and religious thought in Italy, and on the theory and practice of fine art, as well as influencing classical scholarship and historiography. The book challenges the notion that the humanists were propagandists, or that works of art represented conspicuous consumption by the rich. Instead, by arming themselves with ancient morals and with the culture of antiquity as a whole, the scholars, artists and patrons of the Renaissance consciously used antiquity to enhance the moral and intellectual power of the contemporary lay world. The need of the Italian upper class to prove its fitness to govern made it anxious to show an appreciation of such moral and intellectual virtues, and in doing so it advanced its own education as well as the secular culture it patronised. In this, as Dr. Stephens concludes, the significance of the Italian Renaissance was not so much to 'reflect' society as to shape it. The Italian example was soon to be imitated elsewhere: by 1520 the new outlook and the new learning had spread from Italy far beyond the Alps. The reception of these ideas by the laity in Europe at large prepared society for a new 'world view' which was established in the Reformation. Dr. Stephens seeks to give some impression of this larger inheritance of Renaissance culture, as well as defining its achievement in Italy itself, in this powerful and impressive book.