About the author: William J. Bouwsma is Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the foremost American scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation, he is also the author of Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter-Reformation, acclaimed by The Historian as "marvelously rich" and by Renaissance Quarterly as "among the handful of the most significant studies of the history of ideas produced in the 1960s."