Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–1464), better known as Pope Pius II (1458–1464), is and is not the subject of this book. The author's thesis develops the idea that the Renaissance, or at least fifteenth-century Italy, was a time and place where plague, war, famine, the real or conjured up threat of the Turks, and other sources of fear and insecurity were dealt with by strategies of escape. This meant escape into an imagined golden age in the past, especially the classical past, as well as escape into worldly pleasures, escape into distractions, such as festivals and feasts, that masked at least for a while the grim realities of life and early death, not only for poorer people, but also for the elites, all the way up to princes and popes. Thus Arthur White aims not mainly to produce a papal biography, but to show how Pius II, and especially the world in which he lived, were dominated by an escapist mentality, a mentality rather different from the more optimistic attitudes often said to be typical of Renaissance Italy.

White does an excellent job of nuancing what could seem a rather simple argument. He gives a good deal attention to ways in which Pius II and his contemporaries escaped not only into the ancient Greek or Roman past, but to pasts that were closer in time but also out of reach, such as the Crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, or an idealized courtly culture of knights and ladies, and a romanticized chivalry quite at odds with what went on in late medieval Italian cities. Pius once gave a three-hour speech in Mantua to assembled ambassadors on Islam as a false religion and on Muslims as guilty of atrocities against Christians; he concluded with a reference to a 1095 speech of Pope Urban II initiating the first crusade. White shows how Pius II was also a humanist and an author who wrote commentaries in the style or manner of the commentaries of Julius Caesar. Pius despised the mercantile activity around him, and sought refuge from the cities in the countryside, in villas, gardens, and baths where he might obtain some relief from his gout, arthritis, kidney stones, and chronic cough. Nature was an “alternative world to the one he was usually forced to occupy” (162). Yet Pius and his contemporaries also sought to build ideal cities, timeless and perfect in their architecture. Pius had Corsignano rebuilt and renamed Pienza, and intended it as the summer home for the papacy; White provides helpful photographs of the cathedral at Pienza and of the Piccolomini palace.

Pius II was not typical of his age in all things. White notes that though he was keenly interested in architecture, he had little time for sculpture or painting. In his enduring zeal for a crusade against the Turks, he was extreme, and despite his age and medical condition he even proposed to personally lead such a military expedition, an expedition that never happened.

The author's acknowledgements credit a long list of people, and conclude, “Above all I thank the grace and mercy of God” (xxii). Yet a God of grace and mercy White sees as having been largely absent in the beliefs and piety of the Renaissance world he studies: God was remote, rigid, inflexible, and along with “his minions, the saints and the clergy, would have little patience with the everyday, fleshly, human reality” (348). White relies here in part on a 1951 work of art by historian Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1951). But the field has moved on since Meiss, and White seems rather unaware of more recent work on art and plague, and also the multiple volumes of historian of mentalities Jean Delumeau on how people both feared the wrath of an angry God and also found solace and security in a piety that focused on a merciful God, on a fully human Jesus (born in a stable at Bethlehem), on the saints (in particular Mary, the mother of Jesus and saints specializing in interceding for people with specific ailments such as plague), and on the sacraments as conferring God's grace. In his conclusion, White states that “escape from reality meant carving off a God-free zone” (366). Such a statement sounds more like a nineteenth-century and very old-fashioned thesis on Renaissance secularism than anything new or noteworthy. It is also a bit odd given that in his preface White mentions secularism as part of a “myth” of the Renaissance he wishes to refute (xv).

A blurb on the book's back cover states that this a “lively popular history,” perhaps meaning that first-year undergraduates will understand and appreciate it. Though this volume has its limitations, it nevertheless helps to open up for twenty-first century students and scholars a complex and fascinating world of more than five centuries ago.