It's been such a pleasure to discover a series published by Oxford of very short introductions (to historical periods, famous people, and various -isms). Using my Amazon Prime account (which I love and students can get for free for a year) in two days and for $9 I had in my hands Jerry Brotton's
The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction. In 125 brief pages, it gives a great overview of this period.
The image here is Raphael's fresco of the Donation of Constantine. There's Constantine, formally conveying secular authority of the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church. I spoke about that document in the Digital Civilization class -- how Lorenzo Valla discredited it through linguistic analysis and proved it to be of medieval origins. What I didn't know
