This superb collection tells the story of the great flowering of art, architecture, politics, philosophy and literature that marked the beginning of the Modern Age. Five classic volumes by Vincent Cronin, J. R. Hale, G. R. Elton and Boies Penrose.

The Florentine Renaissance

Voltaire called the 15th-century Florentine Renaissance 'one of the four happy and exemplary ages in human history'. The Florentines themselves believed they were living in a golden age, and with passionate enthusiasm they sought out the classical manuscripts to prove it. In the set's opening volume, The Florentine Renaissance, Vincent Cronin shows how humanist scholars like Niccolò Niccoli, not content to preserve classical wisdom as a museum piece, made it central to a modern Christian education, and how the ruling family, the Medici, turned patronage of the arts into an art form. Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Donatello, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti are just a handful of the painters, sculptors and architects who flourished during this remarkable Renaissance spring.

The Flowering of the Renaissance

But it was a fragile beauty that they created. As the Holy Roman Empire and France went to war in Italy, and Florence fell into the hands of the firebrand preacher Savonarola, Rome briefly became Italy's cultural capital. The Flowering of the Renaissance describes how the crumbling old city was beautified by a determined campaign of papal patronage. Michelangelo's astonishing Sistine chapel ceiling (1508-12), the reconstruction of St Peter's and the restoration of countless churches and roads, however, did nothing for Rome's security, and when it was sacked in 1527 by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, the focus of the Italian Renaissance shifted to Venice, where Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto were among the artists to make that city their own.

The Renaissance in Europe

In The Renaissance in Europe J. R. Hale provides an unrivalled insight into the paradoxes of a continent overtaken by the excitement of the new learning. In some respects these were the most glamorous years of the Renaissance - with thinkers of the calibre of Machiavelli and Erasmus, artists of genius from Leonardo da Vinci to Dürer and with the Americas brought enduringly into contact with Europe. In most respects however, the glamour was not apparent to the vast majority of people. Plague was a regular visitor to Northern Europe and was joined by a new scourge, syphilis, which maimed and killed in a particularly repulsive way. Hale describes vividly a population afraid to travel, yet somehow on the move: people venturing abroad in search of work, to sell their wares, to trade artistic talent, and to exchange political and religious ideas in the courts and universities of Europe. The newly invented printing press - seized upon by scholars, educators and religious reformers - allowed the new ideas to spread.

Europe from Renaissance to Reformation

Few people used printing more effectively than Martin Luther, as Geoffrey Elton makes clear in Europe from Renaissance to Reformation. Like many of the Christian humanists, including Erasmus, Luther despaired of the immorality, extravagance and venality of the Roman Church, and longed for a return to a purer faith rooted in the teaching of the Scriptures. But the ninety-five theses he nailed to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517 were the product of his own inner spiritual turmoil rather than radical revolutionary fervour. The cosmopolitan, liberal, colourful character of the Renaissance began to founder amid the increasingly nationalistic, authoritarian and austere atmosphere generated by the religious divide. The complex, brooding figures of Luther and his unrelenting enemy, the Emperor Charles V, dominates the period Elton describes with so much energy and panache.

Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance

The final volume in the set takes us in the steps of the great explorers and navigators - Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Ferdinand Magellan and Amerigo Vespucci among them. These men were to define the parameters of the known world, and once again it was the discovery of a classical Geography, written in the 2nd century by Ptolemy, that provided the spur. Their ventures into a brave new world are the subject of Boies Penrose's Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance. In the wake of conquerors like Columbus went others - some for gain, more in search of religious tolerance and personal liberty. Some were scholars, carrying with them the fruits of the new learning.