Our modern conception of the Renaissance has been changed sustantially by the scholarship of the last 50 years, and the British contribution to this research has been enormous. An essential part of this scholarship is now made more widely available within this lavishly illustrated selection of lectures delivered by distinguished historians to the British Academy.Table of Contents: George Holmes: Introduction; C. M. Ady: Morals and Manners of the Quattrocento; George Holmes: Florence and the Great Schism; Bernard Ashmole: Cyriac of Ancona; Denys Hay: Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages; Cecil Grayson; Leon Battista Alberti and the Beginnings of Italian Grammar; Nicolai Rubinstein: Lorenzo de'Medici: The Formation of his Statecraft; Michael Mallett: Diplomacy and War in Later Fifteenth-Century Italy; D. M. Bueno de Mesquita: The Conscience of the Prince; John Shearman: The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decoration; Johannes Wilde: The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel; Edgar Wind: Michelangelo's Prophets and Sibyls