• FrontMatter,
• PREFACE,
• CONTENTS,
• One. The Background of the Early Florentine Renaissance,
• Two. New Historical and Psychological Ways of Thinking: From Petrarch to Brum and Machiavelli,
• Three. The Changed Perspective of the Past in Bruni's Histories of the Florentine People,
• Four. Bruni's Histories as an Expression of Modern Thought,
• Five. The Memory of Cicero's Roman Civic Spirit in the Medieval Centuries and in the Florentine Renaissance,
• Six. The Florentine Revival of the Philosophy of the Active Political Life,
• Seven. Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought: The Role of Petrarch,
• Eight. Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought: The Role of Florence,
• Nine. Civic Wealth and the New Values of the Renaissance: The Spirit of the Quattrocento,
• Ten. Leon Battista Alberti as an Heir and Critic of Florentine Civic Humanism,
• Index of Names,

Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance is widely considered one of the most important works in Italian Renaissance studies. Princeton University Press published this seminal book in 1955. Now the Press makes available a two-volume collection of eighteen of Professor Baron's essays, most of them thoroughly revised, unpublished, or presented in English for the first time. Spanning the larger part of his career, they provide a continuation of, and complement to, the earlier book. The essays demonstrate that, contemporaneously with the revolution in art, modern humanistic thought developed in the city-state climate of early Renaissance Florence to a far greater extent than has generally been assumed. The publication of these volumes is a major scholarly event: a reinforcement and amplification of the author's conception of civic Humanism.
The book includes studies of medieval antecedents and special studies of Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Leon Battista Alberti. It offers a thoroughly re-conceived profile of Machiavelli, drawn against the background of civic Humanism, as well as essays presenting evidence that French and English Humanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely tied to Italian civic thought of the fifteenth. The work culminates in a reassessment of Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering thought on the Renaissance.
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.