Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Renaissance

Venice's reputation for political stability and a strong, balanced republican government holds a prominent place in European political theory. Edward Muir traces the origins and development of this reputation, paying particular attention to the sixteenth century, when civic ritual in Venice reached its peak. He shows how the ritualization of society and politics was an important reason for Venice's stability. Influenced in part by cultural anthropology, he establishes and applies to Venice a new methodology for the historical study of civic ritual.

From the Middle Ages through most of the sixteenth century, Brotton argues, mapmakers deliberately exploited the partial,...

In Women and Men in Renaissance Venice Stanley Chojnacki explores the central role played by women in holding Venetian patrician society together. Family relations, marriages, and dowries were the areas in which women interacted dynamically with men. The three parts of the book discuss the involvement of the state in those interactions; the social and economic consequences for women; and their unexpectedly varied consequences for men of the patriciate.

The society Chojnacki describes is at once socially complex and highly regulated. On the one hand, women of the Venetian...

Italian Renaissance universities were Europe's intellectual leaders in humanistic studies, law, medicine, philosophy, and science. Employing some of the foremost scholars of the time--including Pietro Pomponazzi, Andreas Vesalius, and Galileo Galilei--the Italian Renaissance university was the prototype of today's research university. This is the first book in any language to offer a comprehensive study of this most influential institution.

In this magisterial study, noted scholar Paul F. Grendler offers a detailed and authoritative account of the universities of Renaissance Italy....

The remarkable breadth of Erasmus' contacts throughout his life is reflected in this unique, informative three-volume biographical dictionary. Together, these fully illustrated volumes will contain information about more than 1900 people mentioned in his correspondence and other writings.

Differing substantially from the national biographical dictionaries which restrict themselves to major figures, these volumes combine the famous with the obscure: the Dutch pope, Adrian VI, appears next to Adrianus, a messenger who carried letters between Erasmus in Paris and Jacob Batt, a tutor in...

Sixteenth century Europe, like the late twentieth century, did not escape the ravages of ethnic discord. In an examination of the Italian presence in France under the Valois and Bourbon monarchs, Henry Heller explores how the economic power of Italian merchants, bankers, and ecclesiastics provoked a hostile reaction from French humanists, lawyers, and nobles that eventually spread to the Huguenots and the urban Catholic population. He also discusses the important role of anti-Italian xenophobia in the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Estates-General of Blois in...

Renato Barahona has distilled years of meticulous research into a pioneering study of sexual criminality, women, honour and the law in early modern Basque Spain. Presenting his argument in a lucid and engaging style, Barahona explores the litigation of honour and dishonour by female victims of seduction. He successfully demonstrates that - in this region and era - female honour lost through sexual transgression could be redeemed through recourse to the law.

Drawing from records of over 350 lawsuits, which took place between 1500 and 1750 (all primary sources, and all previously...

Tudor Historical Thought is a revealing account of vital changes in intellectual orientation. Originally published in 1967, F.J. Levy's seminal work explores the factors - humanism, theology, antiquarianism, Machiavellianism - that brought about the changes in historical thinking from the time of Caxton to that of Bacon, Raleigh, and Camden.

Earlier, the study of the past was justified on utilitarian grounds, and the purpose of history writing was didactic. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, chroniclers exemplified the workings of Providence and taught personal...

This final volume in the Literary and Educational Writings contains diverse woks spanning a generation. They demonstrate Erasmus' skill in applying classical rhetoric to contemporary Christian needs. Four are short rhetorical pieces; the next group illustrates facets of Erasmus' classical scholarship and includes several works that bear witness to Erasmus' friendship with Thomas More.

The last and most expansive piece in the volume, the Lingua, has not previously been translated into English. This work represents Erasmus' growing criticism of his theological position by both...

When Erasmus published the Adages, his monumental collection of proverbs, he wrote in the Introduction that 'a knowledge of proverbs contributes to a number of things, but to four especially: philosophy, persuasiveness, grace and charm in speaking, and the understanding of the best authors.' This volume contains another 600 of the more than 4000 adages that Erasmus gathered and commented on, sometimes in a few lines and sometimes in full-scale essays. The notes identify the classical sources and indicate how Erasmus' reading and thinking developed over the quarter-century spanned by the...

First published in 1971 by Harper & Row, The Society of Renaissance Florence is an invaluable collection of 132 original Florentine documents dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and covering a wide range of subjects from taxes to social mobility, to family, death, and civic life, to violence, crime, and morality. Also included are seldom seen documents addressing the state of the poor and such groups as Jews, heretics, sorcerers, and homosexuals.

'I have made a conscious effort to select material which reveals something about the emotions, passions, and...

'I wish we were able to eliminate poverty completely in this city' Those words written by Juan Luis Vives, a Spanish humanist living in Bruges in 1526, could have been written in the late twentieth century. The urban problems of sixteenth-century Bruges are very familiar to the modern reader: poverty, overcrowding, crime, the problems of the mentally ill, and the issue of the responsibility of government for the care of the poor. Published in 1526, On Assistance to the Poor was Vives' effort to bring these questions to the attention of the City Council of Bruges, and have them addressed by...