No light read, this historical novel features Macchiavelli and Savanarola among its pantheon of characters. At its heart are Romola -- the questing daughter of a Florentine atheist -- and her villainous husband Tito. George Eliot was ever a novelist of ideas, and in this farthest-flung of her books she considers matters of religion, politics and science as they played out in Florence after the expulsion of the Medici. It's a convincing portrait of a complicated age.  (ITL318, $14.00)

Renaissance