Using a wide range of sources and a novel interdisciplinary approach, Jonathan Hughes convincingly argues that a renaissance occurred in late 14th-century Florence and London that had less to do with the discovery of classical antiquity than the inspiration of Dante's vernacular Divine Comedy. Hughes shines a light on how Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer, writers working largely outside the traditional centres of Latin education and cultural authority like the universities, cathedrals and monasteries, realized that the language imparted by mothers to their children held the key to the creation of literature that was imaginative and personal; literature that explored the mysteries of the human personality, demonstrated the power of nature, and reflected the lives and worlds of ordinary people in the city streets and rural fields.

A Premature Renaissance reflects on the ways in which this literature challenged the pre-eminence of Latin and questioned ecclesiastical assumptions (even those of Dante) about the nature of reality, the justice of Divine judgment and the existence of an afterlife, giving prominence to the voice of women and their perspective in the process.

The book also considers how and why this was a brief and ultimately premature renaissance by examining the retreat of these intellectual pioneers from the bold and disturbing implications of their discoveries. In England there was an inevitable repressive response among the Latin educated patriarchy, whose intellectual and cultural authority had been so comprehensively challenged, while in Italy the heavy weight of classical antiquity stifled creative vernacular expression, preventing it from blossoming further at that time.