Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Renaissance

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...

Alvise Cornaro (c.1484-1566) was the son of a Paduan innkeeper with presumed ties to the patrician Cornaro family of Venice. Highly ambitious, he acquired a name for himself as a businessman, architect, and patron of the arts. Critically ill around age 40 - likely with diabetes and gout - he resolved to abandon his intemperate lifestyle. The strict rules regarding food and drink that he adopted and which led to his recovery are outlined in his most famous treatise, the Vita Sobria (1558). The work, which featured prescriptions for living to 100 years - stressing healthy lifestyle,...

This study offers a sustained examination of the presentation of eastern Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa in two of the most important chivalric epics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Matteo Maria Boiardo s Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto s Orlando Furioso (1516). Comparing the narratological strategies used to depict non-European characters in these stories, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Boiardo s cosmopolitan vision of humankind increasingly became replaced by Ariosto s crusading ideology, which emphasized a binary opposition between...

The Spanish Arcadia analyzes the figure of the shepherd in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish imaginary, exploring its centrality to the discourses on racial, cultural, and religious identity. Drawing on a wide range of documents, including theological polemics on blood purity, political treatises, manuals on animal husbandry, historiography, paintings, epic poems, and Spanish ballads, Javier Irigoyen-Garcia argues that the figure of the shepherd takes on extraordinary importance in the reshaping of early modern Spanish identity.

The Spanish Arcadia...

For two centuries (1540-1740) the Sidney family of Penshurt Place, Kent, produced poets, courtiers, collectors, and at least one revolutionary. Increasingly aware of the cultural ideal of the learned nobleman and of libraries as representations of that ideal, the Sidneys amassed one of the largest gentry libraries in England of their period. This edition of their library catalogue provides a vivid portrait of the birth, growth, and eventual demise of the distinguished family's library collection.

Comprised of nearly 5000 entries, the catalogue is presented with a full introduction...

The dawn of print was a major turning point in the early modern world. It rescued ancient learning from obscurity, transformed knowledge of the natural and physical world, and brought the thrill of book ownership to the masses. But, as Andrew Pettegree reveals in this work of great historical merit, the story of the post-Gutenberg world was rather more complicated than we have often come to believe.

The Book in the Renaissance reconstructs the first 150 years of the world of print, exploring the complex web of religious, economic, and cultural concerns surrounding the printed...

• An introduction to early modern English literature for students and general readers.
  
• Considers the ways in which early modern writers construct the past, recover and adapt classical genres, write about people and places, and tackle religious and secular controversies.
  
• Illustrated with a profusion of excerpts from early modern texts.
  
• Writers represented include More, Erasmus,...

The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European 'fortunes'. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which David Hume has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe. This is the first collection of essays to consider how and where Hume's works were initially understood throughout Europe. They reflect on how early European responses to Hume relied on available French translations, and concentrated on his...

Sins of the Fathers considers sins as nodes of cultural anxiety and explores the tensions between competing organizational categories for moral thought and behaviours, namely the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments. Hilaire Kallendorf explores the decline and rise of these organizational categories against critical transformations of the early modern period, such as the accession of Spain to a position of world dominance and the arrival of a new courtly culture to replace an old warrior ethos.
This ground-breaking study is the first to consider Spanish Golden Age...

The introductory volume in the Reading and Studying Literature series, co-published with the Open University, is designed to introduce students to the Renaissance, and the Eighteenth Century. Each period is discussed in terms of an overarching theme, providing a clear focus for study and discussion and introducing readers to an important theoretical concept in literary studies.

The Renaissance is discussed in terms of themes of love and death in tragic drama, with particular reference to Shakepsare's Othello and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The theme of...