Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Renaissance

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...

Cosmopoiesis means world-making, and in this erudite, polemical book, Professor Mazzotta traces how major medieval and Renaissance thinkers invented their worlds through utopias, magic, science, art, and theatre. The Renaissance is usually read from a Cartesian or Hegelian (via Burckhardt) perspective. It is viewed as a time of individualities or it is studied in terms of disembodied ideas and abstract forms. Mazzotta calls for a new approach: the necessity to study the Renaissance in terms of the ongoing conversation of the arts and sciences. His is an encyclopedic grasp that takes into...

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...