Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Renaissance

Published anonymously in 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes upset all the strict hierarchies that governed art and society during the Renaissance. It traces the adventures not of a nobleman or ancient hero, but rather of an ordinary man who struggles for survival in a cruel, corrupt society after growing up under the care of a blind beggar. Giancarlo Maiorino treats this picaresque narrative as a prism for exploring econopoetics, a term he uses to foreground the ways in which literary and economic modes of production feed off one another. His approach introduces readers to the turbulent...

Dreams have been significant in many different cultures, carrying messages about this world and others, posing problems about knowledge, truth, and what it means to be human. This thought-provoking collection of essays explores dreams and visions in early modern Europe, canvassing the place of the dream and dream-theory in texts and in social movements. In topics ranging from the dreams of animals to the visions of Elizabeth I, and from prophetic dreams to ghosts in political writing, this book asks what meanings early modern people found in dreams.

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration;...

Between 1400 and 1700 the political, religious, intellectual, and even geographic landscape was profoundly changed by the Reformation, humanism, the rise of empirical science, the invention of printing technology, and the colonization of the Americas. The late medieval and early modern intellectuals felt an urgent need to respond to the changes they were involved in, and to come to a revision and reauthorization of knowledge. They embarked on a scholarly program of a quality and extent hitherto unknown in the Western world: the whole body of the literature of antiquity, including the...

By 1520, Niccolo Machiavelli's life in Florence was steadily improving: he had achieved a degree of literary fame, and, following his removal from the Florentine Chancery by the Medici family, he had managed to gain their respect and patronage. But there is one figure whose substantial contributions to Machiavelli's restoration has been hitherto neglected - Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi (1482-1549), a younger and fabulously wealthy Florentine nobleman. As manuscript evidence suggests, Strozzi brought Machiavelli into his patronage network and aided many of his post-1520...