Essays illustrate the ways Renaissance Florentines expressed or shaped their identities as they interacted with their society.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the city of Florence experienced the most creative period in her entire history. This book is an in-depth analysis of that dynamic community, focusing primarily on the years 1380-1450 in an examination of the city's physical character, its economic and social structure and developments, its political and religious life, and its cultural achievement. For this edition, Mr. Brucker has added Notes on Florentine Scholarship and a Bibliographical Supplement.

Public life - Humanism - Civic humanism - Friendship - Ritual - Alberti - Women in Florence - Family - Everyday life in Florence.

A forefront Italian Renaissance historian and author of Fire in the City evaluates darker aspects of the Renaissance including the military forces that ravaged Europe and shaped the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, exploring how massive, mobile armies consumed resources, spread disease and innovated violent new weapons.