This classic of the cultural history is still, forty years after its first edition, a suggestive view to the society and intellectual world of the modern Valencian country. Far from academic rigidity and looking for the non-specialised reader's complicity, these texts, written with accuracy but without forsaking the essayist's freedom of expression, posed problems, hazared guessworks and finally advanced hypothesis which opened the way to historiographic research. Subjects such as 16th century humanists, agermanats' imaginary and Baroque sacred oratory are, in Joan Fuster's reflections, much more than erudite pleasantness, they become issues from a past that have set up the Valencian current society. As himself said about those humanists, revolutionaries and orators: «we carry them on our social reflections and on our individual behaviour... Therefore it won't be superfluous to know them». So, this book is an invitation to enter a decisive period of the European history which, in the case of Valencian country, has special echoes that goes further than the limited concept of «Decadency».