This is a rich portrait of Europe and its civilization in the 16th century - the moment when Europe first became an entity in the minds of its own inhabitants. It does not simply survey high culture, but paints a gigantic portrait of the age, enlivened by a mass of detail about the lives of often obscure figures who Hale brings to life to give point to his multiplicity of arguments. What precisely is meant by civilization? How usefully descriptive of the period as a whole is Renaissance? What, indeed, did Italy (for example) mean to contemporaries? These are some of the questions which Hale addresses in this challenging book.