This classic work marks the culmination of a definite stage in the socio-economic historiography from the late Middle Ages to the rise of the haute bourgeoisie in the early Renaissance. Here Alfred von Martin attempts to discover and define the spirit or essence of the Renaissance, and with it the spirit of early capitalism as it arose in Florence.

His analysis focuses on the capitalist haute bourgeois who represented the economically, politically, and culturally dominant class of the Renaissance. As he shows, eventually its decline brings about a new stasis in the...