The dawn of the Renaissance - The prince and the state - Machiavelli - The arts - The young Michelangelo - Florence : cradle of humanism - Guilds - ; Lorenzo de' Meduci Milan : city of strife - Leonardo da Vinci - Rome : splendour and the papacy - Pope Pius II; Venice : the golden years - Doge Francesco Foscari - The images of man - Federigo da Montefeltro - The spread of the Renaissancenc_____________

The era between the accession of Henry VIII and the crisis of the English republic in 1659 formed one of the most fertile epochs in world literature. This anthology offers a broad selection of its poetry, and includes a wide range of works by the great poets of the age - notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Sepnser, John Donne, William Shakespeare and John Milton. Poems by less well-known writers also feature prominently - among them significant female poets such as Lady Mary Wroth and Katherine Philips. Compelling and exhilarating, this landmark collection illuminates a time of astonishing innovation, imagination and diversity.

On the one hand it produced the tender work of Giotto and the brilliance of a Leonardo; on the other, it encompassed the atrocities of a Borgia, the fanaticism of a Savonarola and the cynicism of a Machiavelli. Civil disorders, political violence, religious discord and deep-seated corruption provided a setting in which genius flowered and where virtuosity, originality and an explosive energy shone through in politics, in art, in thought and even in murder.