European Political Cultures Book

The author very sensibly uses BCE and CE for the dating system in this book, rather than the antiquated BC and AD system that many modern historians still very embarrassingly use.

This book is clearly written for students, but that doesn't detract from the work. As the title rather strongly suggests, this is meant to be little more than an introduction to the complex subject of Renaissance Italy. Instead of having a single bibliography listed at the back of the book, the author has a bibliography listed at the end of each chapter. The reason is that each chapter targets specific aspects or Renaissance Italy, so the bibliographies are relevant to the topics covered in each chapter. To be honest, though, I would have still liked an overall bibliography at the end of the book.

The author has a bit of an odd habit of sometimes writing the Italian for the century instead of simple English; for example, Duecento instead of thirteenth century. What makes it odd is that it's not consistent, so sometimes she uses Italian, sometimes English. Since this book was never meant to be an Italian language guide, I would have preferred that she simply stuck to the English for the sake of ease and simplicity, especially since this was aimed especially at students.

But even though it was indeed primarily written with students in mind, there's absolutely no reason why non-students like me can't read it. It's a very good introduction to the subject.