Gold, Glory and the Gospel: The Adventurous Lives and Times of the Renaissance Explorers

xvi, 362 pp. In the late fifteenth century Europe was astir with dreams of discovery that would shortly transform the world. It was an age of intense intellectual curiosity, of questioning, testing, and the balancing of conflicting motivations. The author, a distinguished Renaissance historian, has sorted out the contradictory motives and behavior of the European explorers and exploiters in this Golden Age, looking at the lands they discovered, sometimes conquered, and often bloodied- Africa, India, Mexico, Central and South America. He describes in dramatic detail the extraordinary feats and strange attitudes of the Renaissance conquerors and explorers as he traces the course of Europe's expansion overseas from the era of Columbus to the early seventeenth century.