Rather more than forty-five years ago, the late Hans Baron began publishing the series of studies of which the centrepiece is entitled The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. He presented a complex thesis which it is necessary to summarise. Focusing on the writings of Florentine authors from Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni in the first half of the fifteenth century to Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini in the first half of the sixteenth, Baron posited a ‘crisis of liberty’ occasioned by the war of 1400–02, in which Florence had confronted the danger that Giangaleazzo Visconti, the lord of Milan, was about to establish a hegemony over all the city republics of north and central Italy. This had produced a sudden and intense awareness of the values of liberty, specifically that liberty enjoyed by citizens in the government of their republic and themselves, as described by Athenian authors including Aristotle and Roman authors including Livy; and because the humanist rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts included so many in which eleutheria, autonomia and libertas in this sense were presented as among the highest values, Baron felt justified in describing as ‘civic humanism’ an ideology valuing classical antiquity in which the good life for man was held to be that of the citizen in a republic.