The Verge: Reformation Renaissance and Forty Years That Shook the World

Wyman focuses on the decades between roughly 1490 and 1530 — when the printing press, the Reformation, the conquest of the Americas, and the rise of global trade collided to produce the recognizably modern world. Rather than tracing great men and decisive battles, he illuminates the period through ordinary people caught in transformation: a Venetian printer, a German banker, a Tlaxcalan warrior, a Swiss mercenary. The Verge makes you feel the texture of a world being remade. Wyman wears his scholarship lightly; this is popular history at its most readable and most honest about what we can and cannot know.

For the intellectual backstory to this period, Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve shows how the rediscovery of a single ancient text helped set the stage for everything Wyman describes.