Norton Glover finished reading The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
Jacob Burckhardt was born in 1818 in Basel, Switzerland. He studied history at the University …
One of the classic works on the Renaissance. I'm told it's quite influential, though Renaissance scholarship has advanced greatly since 1860, so a lot of this quite obsolete. Apparently a lot of the popular preconceptions about the Renaissance come from this book.
It's still well written (and well translated from the Italian).