This book has been popular with students, but it was intended only as a basic introduction. The only recent synthetic work covering the Renaissance period is John Hale's Florence and the Medici: the Pattern of Control (5). Conceptually, it was outdated when it was published. It made little use of the scholarship then available. Its sources went scarcely further than a few of the published chronicles. Schevill's history, dating from 1937 (4), was never a serious piece of work. There has been no credible attempt to write a history of Florence in this period since the time of Perrens's multi-volume work, finished in 1883 (3). Among current Florentine historians, he is particularly well qualified to write a new history of later medieval and Renaissance Florence. His previous books on Florentine political, social and constitutional developments from 1280 to 1400 (1) and on Machiavelli's correspondence with Francesco Vettori (2) have shown him to be a scholar of learning, imagination and intellectual penetration, with a profound knowledge of Florentine history from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and with a remarkable range of interests in political, social and intellectual history. John Najemy is a pre-eminent historian of Renaissance Florence.
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