Chronicles of the Renaissance is a highly readable account of the history and culture of the Renaissance from its origins in Italy to its spread through Europe and beyond.
Among the many value-laden terms to describe the past "Renaissance" is perhaps the most powerful, and the most evocative. For the concept of rebirth applied to a civilisation implies both a prior death and a prospective growth; it carries within it both the notion of dependence upon a pagan past and, in accordance with the potent Christian myth, the promise of a better life to come. That the beginnings of the modern world should now be characterised not just as a renaissance - for there had been others - but as the Renaissance, attests to a striking, and perhaps undue, optimism on the part of posterity as to the permanent potential of human society for self-improvement.
Yet this Renaissance is not purely the invention of modern historians, even if the term itself was not used in English until the the early 19th century: Nth- and 15th-century Italians were already alert to changes in their society, and most, especially in their culture, that they were anxious to promote a bringing back to light, or to life, of the values of an earlier age. They themselves believed that something was indeed being reborn.