Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Renaissance

Genealogy of the Pagan Gods by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is an ambitious work of humanistic scholarship whose goal is to plunder ancient and medieval literary sources so as to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. The work also contains a famous defense of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a Christian world.

The complete work in fifteen books contains a meticulously organized genealogical tree identifying approximately 950 Greco-Roman mythological figures. The scope is enormous: 723 chapters include over a thousand citations from 200 Greek,...

Since the publication of The Prince five centuries ago, Machiavelli has been associated with political amorality. But that characterization is unfair. In Be Like the Fox, Erica Benner sets the record straight: far from the ruthless "Machiavellian" henchman that people think he was, Machiavelli emerges here as a profound ethical thinker who fought to uphold high moral standards and restore the democratic freedoms of his beloved Florence.

Shaking the dust from history, Benner masterfully interweaves Machiavelli's words with those of his friends and enemies, giving us...

The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest engineering projects in seventeenth-century Europe. A series of Dutch and English -projectors, - working over several decades and with the full support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable farmland. The drainage project was also supposed to reform the sickly, backward fenlanders into civilized, healthy farmers, to the benefit of the entire commonwealth. As projectors reconstructed entire river systems, these new, artificial channels profoundly altered both...

After spending several months in England, Erasmus returned to Paris in the winter of 1500 and set about compiling a small anthology of classical proverbs known as the Adagiorum collectanea. This modest work became the basis for one of Erasmus' best known and longest works, when it was expanded in 1508 into the far more substantial Adagiorum chiliades.　The essay that begins this introductory volume to the Adages explores the development of the Collectanea and its transformation into the Adagiorum chiliades. It is followed by the first annotated...

In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the...

Incorporating a wide range of visual and translated written sources, The Modern Spain Sourcebook documents Spain's history from the Enlightenment to the present.

The book is thematically arranged and includes six key primary sources on ten significant areas of Spanish history, including the arts, work, education, religion, politics, sexuality and empire. As well as the book's overarching introduction, there are theme-specific introductions and vital historical context sections provided for the sources that are presented. There are also useful suggested analytical questions and...

From Commedia dell'Arte came archetypal characters that are still with us today, such as Harlequin and Pantalone, and the rediscovered craft of writing comic dramas and masked theatre. From it came the forces that helped create and influence Opera, Ballet, Pantomime, Shakespeare, Moliere, Lopes de Vega, Goldoni, Meyerhold, and even the glove puppet, Mr Punch.

The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte is a wide-ranging volume written by over 50 experts that traces the history, characteristics, and development of this fascinating yet elusive theatre form. In synthesising...

Annibal Caro wrote The Scruffy Scoundrels (Gli Straccioni) in Rome in early 1543 for his patron Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of Pope Paul III. The actual performance of the play was delayed, then ultimately canceled after the death of its patron. Caro denied numerous requests for permission to stage the play and even to have it copied. First published in 1582 in an edition full of errors and lacunae due to censorship, it was not until 1942 that the work was finally edited based on the original manuscript (Vaticano Urbinate 764).

In his...

Annibal Caro wrote The Scruffy Scoundrels (Gli Straccioni) in Rome in early 1543 for his patron Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of Pope Paul III. The actual performance of the play was delayed, then ultimately canceled after the death of its patron. Caro denied numerous requests for permission to stage the play and even to have it copied. First published in 1582 in an edition full of errors and lacunae due to censorship, it was not until 1942 that the work was finally edited based on the original manuscript (Vaticano Urbinate 764).

In his...

In this learned and delightful book, John L. Lievsay shows how energetic English printers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to bring the language and literature of Italy into England. His description of how these men, who were not usually troubled by modesty and sometimes not by honesty, capitalized on and helped to create the Englishman's appetite for things Italian will be welcomed by scholars; his analysis of the contents of libraries and catalogues and his commentary on the books themselves will be relished by those who enjoy the scholarship and the gossip behind the...