What is the moment in history that you would like to have witnessed—and why?' This is the thought-provoking question that Theodore Rabb and Byron Hollinshead posed to twenty of our finest historians. Their answers can be found in this fascinating and thoroughly readable book, which trains a lens on crucial moments of our past and brings them to vivid life. Contributors include Tom Holland, John Elliott, John Julius Norwich, Margaret MacMillan and John Keegan and with these - and other - peerless scholars as their guides, readers will be transported to the death of Alexander the Great, Christmas 800CE when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Hannibal's legendary crossing of the Alps, Runnymede where King John was forced to sign Magna Carta, the Spanish Armada, the Battle of the Nile, Paris 1919, the German surrender in 1945 and the end of the First Gulf War. Imaginatively executed and vividly written, the result is a pageant of character and event that will attract and delight readers of history.

With Renaissance Lives , Theodore K. Rabb revives a tradition of writing that was often practiced by the historians of that astounding era: to tell the story of an age by examining the lives of those who lived it. Rabb's subjects are all people who felt change gather speed around them: from Titian and Galileo to Catherine de' Medici and John Milton. In their stories we see, above all, the powers of ideas to liberate, to enthrall, to provoke, and to resolve conflict. Renaissance Lives shows us the struggle , with its grave disappointments but also its extraordinary achievements that accompanied the creation of the world we recognize as our own.

There is little debate that the Renaissance began at the end of the fourteenth century. Its end, though, is much more difficult to pin down. Here, for the first time, renowned classicist Theodore Rabb defines the changes that marked the shift away from the Renaissance to Modernity, and explains why these changes took place. The European Renaissance is usually characterized by the belief that a distinct antique civilization represented the ideal for all human endeavors. But there were other unities that defined the era: a shift in the role of the aristocracy from a warrior class to a cultural elite, a growth in education, a more thoughtful probing into the sciences, and the use of the arts for nonreligious purposes.By the dawn of the seventeenth century, four developments had swept over the world, altering these unities and ending the Renaissance: a break with the period's obsession with the past, which invited openness to innovation a quest for central political control to cure increasing instability a change in direction of people's passion and enthusiasm and a new commitment to reason. With thoughtful, wide-lens scholarship and close, detailed looks throughout at the significant moments of change, Rabb offers us a radically new understanding of one of the most pivotal shifts in modern history.

What is the moment in history that you would like to have witnessed—and why?' This is the thought-provoking question that Theodore Rabb and Byron Hollinshead posed to twenty of our finest historians. Their answers can be found in this fascinating and thoroughly readable book, which trains a lens on crucial moments of our past and brings them to vivid life. Contributors include Tom Holland, John Elliott, John Julius Norwich, Margaret MacMillan and John Keegan and with these - and other - peerless scholars as their guides, readers will be transported to the death of Alexander the Great, Christmas 800CE when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Hannibal's legendary crossing of the Alps, Runnymede where King John was forced to sign Magna Carta, the Spanish Armada, the Battle of the Nile, Paris 1919, the German surrender in 1945 and the end of the First Gulf War. Imaginatively executed and vividly written, the result is a pageant of character and event that will attract and delight readers of history.

With Renaissance Lives , Theodore K. Rabb revives a tradition of writing that was often practiced by the historians of that astounding era: to tell the story of an age by examining the lives of those who lived it. Rabb's subjects are all people who felt change gather speed around them: from Titian and Galileo to Catherine de' Medici and John Milton. In their stories we see, above all, the powers of ideas to liberate, to enthrall, to provoke, and to resolve conflict. Renaissance Lives shows us the struggle , with its grave disappointments but also its extraordinary achievements that accompanied the creation of the world we recognize as our own.

There is little debate that the Renaissance began at the end of the fourteenth century. Its end, though, is much more difficult to pin down. Here, for the first time, renowned classicist Theodore Rabb defines the changes that marked the shift away from the Renaissance to Modernity, and explains why these changes took place. The European Renaissance is usually characterized by the belief that a distinct antique civilization represented the ideal for all human endeavors. But there were other unities that defined the era: a shift in the role of the aristocracy from a warrior class to a cultural elite, a growth in education, a more thoughtful probing into the sciences, and the use of the arts for nonreligious purposes.By the dawn of the seventeenth century, four developments had swept over the world, altering these unities and ending the Renaissance: a break with the period's obsession with the past, which invited openness to innovation a quest for central political control to cure increasing instability a change in direction of people's passion and enthusiasm and a new commitment to reason. With thoughtful, wide-lens scholarship and close, detailed looks throughout at the significant moments of change, Rabb offers us a radically new understanding of one of the most pivotal shifts in modern history.