This seems like a great introduction to Renaissance political thought. I particularly liked the first two parts which linked Italian political thought with the political fortunes of the city states. The third part on the northern Renaissance was a bit less interesting, but it certainly serves its purpose as a connecting link to Volume 2. The book is well-written throughout and does not over-emphasize the most famous authors, such as Machiavelli or More, at the expense of their contemporaries. The author has partitioned his presentation well, which makes the book an enjoyable reading experience.

What's to review? There's no competition, nothing else you can read that will fill in the story for you so well or so clearly. It can get a bit dry, but you can put up with that for a couple hundred pages, because the garbage that Skinner had to read to write this must have been equally if not more dry, and run into the hundreds of thousands of pages. A wonderful combination of history, history of ideas, and the ways they act on each other. ( )

An absolute must, for its method and its contents ( )