WINNER OF THE 2006 J. F. LEWIS AWARD

Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes deals with the history of eyeglasses from their invention in Italy ca. 1286 to the appearance of the telescope three centuries later. "By the end of the sixteenth century eyeglasses were as common in western and central Europe as desktop computers are in western developed countries today." Eyeglasses served an important technological function at both the intellectual and practical level, not only easing the textual studies of scholars but also easing the work of craftsmen/small businessmen.

An important subthesis of this book is that Florence, rather than Venice, seems to have dominated the commercial market for eyeglasses during the fifteenth century, when two crucial developments occurred: the ability to grind convex lenses for various levels of presbyopia and the ability to grind concave lenses for the correction of myopia. As a result, eyeglasses could be made almost to prescription by the early seventeenth century.

Vincent Ilardi is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and through the years has been a prolific speaker and author on the fifteenth century. Papers presented include "Diplomatic History as 'Total' History? A Fifteenth-Century Perspective" (International Congress on the Fifteenth Century, University of Perpignan, France, 1990); books include Studies in Italian Renaissance Diplomatic History (London, Variorum Reprints, 1986).