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The extraordinary cultural Renaissance in the northern Italian courts of the late 15th and early 16th centuries is the subject of this volume. It starts with Baldessar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528) which encapsulates this sense of renewal: his experiences at court and their subsequent rewriting form the backbone of the work. The author then addresses questions of biography, gender, genre, and the varied roles of the courtier, expanding the perspective of Castiglione's text to include the lives and writings of other courtiers and patrons. What was it like to be a courtier? What were the problems associated with such a lifestyle? The importance of women in court circles is also highlighted in studies of one of the most notable of female patrons Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) and of the theoretical developments in writing about gender, stimulated by such women. Stephen Kolsky's analysis of both well-known and comparatively obscure texts brings out the diversity of practices that constituted court society and their centrality to our understanding of the Renaissance.
The extraordinary cultural Renaissance in the northern Italian courts of the late 15th and early 16th centuries is the subject of this volume. It starts with Baldessar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528) which encapsulates this sense of renewal: his experiences at court and their subsequent rewriting form the backbone of the work. The author then addresses questions of biography, gender, genre, and the varied roles of the courtier, expanding the perspective of Castiglione's text to include the lives and writings of other courtiers and patrons. What was it like to be a courtier? What were the problems associated with such a lifestyle? The importance of women in court circles is also highlighted in studies of one of the most notable of female patrons Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) and of the theoretical developments in writing about gender, stimulated by such women. Stephen Kolsky's analysis of both well-known and comparatively obscure texts brings out the diversity of practices that constituted court society and their centrality to our understanding of the Renaissance.
In 1420, after more than one hundred years of the Avignon Exile and the Western Schism, the papal court returned to Rome, which had become depopulated, dangerous, and impoverished in the papacy's absence. Reviving the Eternal City examines the culture of Rome and the papal court during the first half of the fifteenth century, a crucial transitional period before the city's rebirth. As Elizabeth McCahill explains, during these decades Rome and the Curia were caught between conflicting realities--between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of the city as a papal capital. Through the testimony of humanists' rhetorical texts and surviving archival materials, McCahill reconstructs the niche that scholars carved for themselves as they penned vivid descriptions of Rome and offered remedies for contemporary social, economic, religious, and political problems. In addition to analyzing the humanists' intellectual and professional program, McCahill investigates the different agendas that popes Martin V (1417-1431) and Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and their cardinals had for the post-Schism pontificate. Reviving the Eternal City illuminates an urban environment in transition and explores the ways in which curialists collaborated and competed to develop Rome's ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.
In the first book systematically to give evidence of conjugal co-rule at an Italian Renaissance court, and the first full length scholarly study of Isabella d'Este and Francesco Gonzaga, Sarah Cockram shows their relationship in an entirely new light. The book draws on (and presents) a large amount of unpublished archival material, including almost unprecedented surviving correspondence between and around these Renaissance princely rulers. Using these sources, Cockram shows Isabella and Francesco's strategic teamwork in action, illuminating tactics of collaboration and dissimulation. She also reveals behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity; court procedures; sexual politics and seduction; gift-giving and network-building; rivalries, intrigues and assassinations. Several epistolary themes emerge: insights into the couple's communication practices and double-dealing, their use of intermediaries, and attention to security matters. This book's analysis of Isabella's co-rule with her husband, supported by other members of the Gonzaga dynasty, sees her sometimes in the role of subordinate partner, sometimes guiding the couple's actions. It shows how, despite appearances at times, the couple shared common diplomatic policy as well as human, material, and cultural resources; joint administration; and the exercise of authority and justice. Thus emerges a three-dimensional picture of the mechanisms of power and power sharing in the age of Machiavelli.
The Spanish romance Cárcel de amor blossomed into a transnational and multilingual phenomenon that captivated audiences throughout Europe at a time when literacy was expanding and print production was changing the nature of reading, writing, and of literature itself. In The Prison of Love, Emily Francomano offers the first comparative study of this sixteenth-century work as a transcultural, humanist fiction. Blending literary analysis and book history, Francomano provides us with the richly textured history of the translations, material books, and artefacts that make this tale of love, letters, and courtly intrigue an invaluable prism through which the multifaceted world of sixteenth-century literary and book cultures are refracted.
The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is a single volume companion that discusses the history of science as it is done today, providing a survey of the debates and issues that dominate current scholarly discussion, with contributions from leading international scholars. Provides a single-volume overview of current scholarship in the history of science edited by one of the leading figures in the field Features forty essays by leading international scholars providing an overview of the key debates and developments in the history of science Reflects the shift towards deeper historical contextualization within the field Helps communicate and integrate perspectives from the history of science with other areas of historical inquiry Includes discussion of non-Western themes which are integrated throughout the chapters Divided into four sections based on key analytic categories that reflect new approaches in the field
From Giotto’s artistic revolution at the dawn of the fourteenth century to the scientific discoveries of Galileo in the early seventeenth, this book explores the cultural developments of one of the most remarkable and vibrant periods of history—the Italian Renaissance. What makes the period all the more amazing is that this flowering of the visual arts, literature, and philosophy occurred against a turbulent backdrop of civic factionalism, foreign invasions, war, and pestilence. The fifteen chapters move briskly from the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West through the growth of the Italian city-states, where, in the crucible of pandemic disease and social unrest, a new approach to learning known as humanism was forged, political and religious certainties challenged. Traversing the entire Italian Peninsula— Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples and Sicily—this book examines the rich regional diversity of Renaissance cultural experience and considers men’s and women’s lives, their changing social attitudes and beliefs across three centuries. This second edition has been updated throughout; it now contains dozens of color images and timelines, as well as links to the author's new companion book of primary sources, Voices from the Italian Renaissance. Readers will need no preliminary background on the subject matter, as the story is told in a lively, readable narrative. Interdisciplinary in nature, its characters are merchants, bankers, artists, saints, soldiers of fortune, poets, popes, and courtesans. With brief literary excerpts, first-hand accounts, maps, and illustrations that help bring the era to life, this is an ideal text for students in a college survey course, as well as for the interested general reader or traveler to Italy who is curious to learn more about the extraordinary heritage of the Renaissance.
Ingratiation from the Renaissance to the Present explores a common ethical problem for intellectuals of the Renaissance: How does one win the favor and patronage of the wealthy and powerful and yet maintain one’s dignity, independence, or principles? This study examines this and similar ethical dilemmas and how they were reflected in the lives and writings of intellectuals of the period—particularly Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, and Michel de Montaigne. It also places the issues within their larger social and cultural context and provides comparisons to the contemporary world.
This book demonstrates that a crucial component of statebuilding in Venice was the management of public speech. Using a variety of historical sources, Horodowich shows that the Venetian state constructed a normative language - a language based on standards of politeness, civility, and piety - to protect and reinforce its civic identity.