Denys Hay (29 August 1915 - 14 June 1994) was a historian specializing in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and notable for demonstrating the influence of Italy on events in the rest of the continent.

He taught at the University of Edinburgh from 1954 until he retired in 1980, and is remembered with the "Denys Hay Seminar" there.

Books

  • The Anglica historia of Polydore Vergil, AD 1485-1537, editor (1950)
  • Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Clarendon Press, 1952)
  • From Roman Empire to Renaissance Europe (1953), revised as The Medieval Centuries (1964)
  • Europe: the Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh University Press, 1957)
  • The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background (1961, 1977)
  • Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centures (1966, 2nd ed 1989) ISBN 0582491797
  • Italian Clergy and Italian Culture in the Fifteenth Century (1973)
  • Renaissance Essays (1988)
  • Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1380-1530 (Longman History of Italy) (1989) ISBN 058248359X
  • New Cambridge Modern History

  • Annalists and historians : Western historiography from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries