Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Renaissance

This innovative work argues that Shakespeare was as great a philosopher as he was a poet, and that his greatness as a poet derived even more from his power as a thinker than from his genius for linguistic expression. Accordingly, Leon Craig's interpretation of the plays - focusing primarily on Macbeth and King Lear, but including extensive comments on Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure - are intended to demonstrate what can be gained from reading Shakespeare 'philosophically.'

Shakespeare, Craig argues, had a persistent fascination with the relationship between...

An Italian Renaissance Sextet is a collection of six tales offering a unique view of the history of Renaissance Italy, with fiction and fictional modes becoming gateways to a real, historical world. All written between 1400 and 1500 - among them a rare gem by Lorenzo the Magnificent and a famous account featuring Filippo Brunelleschi - the stories are presented here in lively translations.

As engrossing, fresh, and high-spirited as those in Boccaccio's Decameron, the tales deal with marriage, deception, rural manners, gender relations, social ambitions, adultery,...

By highlighting the intersection of clergy, elites, and outcast groups, Working in the Vineyard of the Lord illuminates the understanding of religious reform, popular devotion, and changing attitudes toward charity in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Italy. Lance Lazar's work represents a new look at popular devotion throughout Early Modern Italy and its distillation in confraternal piety.

Lazar's research sheds new light on the sixteenth-century revolution in charity and poor relief, particularly the aggressive new charity focusing on marginalized groups such as...

With the emergence of utopia as a cultural genre in the sixteenth century, a dual understanding of alternative societies, as either political or literary, took shape. In Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England, Christopher Kendrick argues that the chief cultural-discursive conditions of this development are to be found in the practice of carnivalesque satire and in the attempt to construct a valid commonwealth ideology. Meanwhile, the enabling social-political condition of the new utopian writing is the existence of a social class of smallholders whose unevenly...

From Latin humanists to popular writers, Italian Renaissance culture spawned a lively debate on vocational choice and the nature of profession. In The Culture of Profession in Late Renaissance Italy, George W. McClure examines the turn this debate took in the second half of the Renaissance, when the learned 'praise and rebuke' of profession began to be complemented with more popular forms of discourse, and when less learned vocations made their voice heard.

Focusing primarily on sources assembled and published in the sixteenth century, McClure's study explores professional...

Often abstracted by the aesthetic implications of music itself, musical instruments can be seen as physical signifiers apart from the music that they produce. In Sounding Objects, Carla Zecher studies the representation of musical instruments in French Renaissance poetry and art, arguing that the efficacy of these material objects as literary and pictorial images was derived from their physical characteristics and acoustic properties, as well as from their aesthetic product.

Sounding Objects is concerned with ways in which musical culture provided poets with a rich, nuanced...

In the early modern period, the theatrical stage offered one of the most popular forms of entertainment and aesthetic pleasure. It also fulfilled an important cultural function by displaying modes of behaviour and dramatizing social interaction within a community. Flaunting argues that the theatre in late sixteenth-century England created the conditions for a subculture of style whose members came to distinguish themselves by their sartorial extravagance and social impudence.

Drawing on evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, accounts of playhouse...

Robert Barnes (1495-1540) was perhaps the most important sixteenth-century English Protestant reformer after William Tyndale. The shifting religious and political views of Henry VIII positioned Barnes at the opposite end of the popular ideology of the day, culminating in his execution in 1540 soon after that of Thomas Cromwell.A Supplication Vnto the Most Gracyous Prince Kynge Henry The. VIIJ., the first edition of which appeared in 1531 during Barnes's German exile, was a controversial lament for the religious climate in England and an earnest argument in favour of reform.
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For centuries, the idea of a Renaissance at the end of the Middle Ages has been an active agent in shaping conceptions of the development of Western European civilization. Though the idea has enjoyed so long a life, conceptions of the nature of the Renaissance, of its sources, its extent, and its essential spirit have varied from generation to generation. Confined at first to a rebirth of art or of classical culture, the notion of the Renaissance was broadened as scholars of each successive generation added to what they regarded as the essence of modern, as opposed to medieval,...