The leading architectureal historian Henry Russell Hitchock offers the first comprehensive account in english of the Schlosser (castles). churches, and civic and domestic buildings of the German Renaissance. His generously illustrated narrative covers the period from 1510, which marked the beginning of the Renaissance in Germany, to the outbreak of the Thirthy Years war more than a century later. Implicit in his chronology is the recognition of a related series of highly productive stylistic episodes, from the Italian design reflected in the first quarter of the sixteenth century in southern Germany to late northern mannerism a century later.