"A Renaissance perspective on what it is to be human."
Renaissance Quarterly
"Phillips has enriched our understanding of Renaissance Florence by extensively presenting contemporary evidence from the diaries, letters, and memoir."
The Sunday Times
"Marco Parenti was a moderately prosperous silk merchant in fifteenth-century Florence, decently educated, a responsible citizen, an amateur historian and a man with a leaning toward the natural science. Mark Phillips... is a scrupulous twentieth-century scholar with a particular interest in why and how other men wrote history. The encounter between the two has resulted in an outstanding book... Parenti is marvelously vivid and endearing, in his study, in his warehouse, in his city, in a society where a man did not 'separate the prosperity of his soul from the health of his body or the wealth of his possessions."
Penelope Fitzgerald, in The New York Times Book Review
