This volume brings together some of the most exciting renaissance scholars to suggest new ways of thinking about the period and to set a new series of agendas for Renaissance scholarship.

• Overturns the idea that it was a period of European cultural triumph and highlights the negative as well as the positive.
  
• Looks at the Renaissance from a world, as opposed to just European, perspective.
  
• Views the Renaissance from perspectives other than just the cultural elite.
  
• Gender, sex, violence, and cultural history are integrated into the analysis.