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From 828, when Venetian merchants carried home from Alexandria the stolen relics of St. Mark, to the fall of the Venetian Republic to Napoleon in 1797, the visual arts in Venice were dramatically influenced by Islamic art. Because of its strategic location on the Mediterranean, Venice had long imported objects from the Near East through channels of trade, and it flourished during this particular period as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub. This monumental book examines Venice's rise as the "bazaar of Europe" and how and why the city absorbed artistic and cultural ideas that originated in the Islamic world. Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 features a wide range of fascinating images and objects, including paintings and drawings by familiar Venetian artists such as Bellini, Carpaccio, and Tiepolo; beautiful Persian and Ottoman miniatures; and inlaid metalwork, ceramics, lacquer ware, gilded and enameled glass, textiles, and carpets made in the Serene Republic and the Mamluk, Ottoman, and Safavid Empires. Together these exquisite objects illuminate the ways Islamic art inspired Venetian artists, while also highlighting Venice's own views toward its neighboring region. Fascinating essays by distinguished scholars and conservators offer new historical and technical insights into this unique artistic relationship between East and West.
The field of Venetian studies has experienced a significant expansion in recent years, and the Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 provides a single volume overview of the most recent developments. It is organized thematically and covers a range of topics including political culture, economy, religion, gender, art, literature, music, and the environment. Each chapter provides a broad but comprehensive historical and historiographical overview of the current state and future directions of research. The Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797 represents a new point of reference for the next generation of students of early modern Venetian studies, as well as more broadly for scholars working on all aspects of the early modern world. Contributors are Alfredo Viggiano, Benjamin Arbel, Michael Knapton, Claudio Povolo, Luciano Pezzolo, Anna Bellavitis, Anne Schutte, Guido Ruggiero, Benjamin Ravid, Silvana Seidel Menchi, Cecilia Cristellon, David D’Andrea, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Wolfgang Wolters, Dulcia Meijers, Massimo Favilla, Ruggero Rugolo, Deborah Howard, Linda Carroll, Jonathan Glixon, Paul Grendler, Edward Muir, William Eamon, Edoardo Demo, Margaret King, Mario Infelise, Margaret Rosenthal and Ronnie Ferguson.
In the fourteenth century, garish ornaments, bright colors, gilt, and military effects helped usher in the age of fashion in Italy. Over a short span of years important matters began to turn on the cut of a sleeve. Fashion influenced consumption and provided a stimulus that drove demand for goods and turned wealthy townspeople into enthusiastic consumers. Making wise decisions about the alarmingly expensive goods that composed a fashionable wardrobe became a matter of pressing concern, especially when the market caught on and became awash in cheaper editions of luxury wares. Focusing on the luxury trade in fashionable wear and accessories in Venice, Florence, and other towns in Italy, Gilding the Market investigates a major shift in patterns of consumption at the height of medieval prosperity, which, more remarkably, continued through the subsequent era of plague, return of plague, and increased warfare. A fine sensitivity to the demands of "le pompe," that is, the public display of private wealth, infected town life. The quest for luxuries affected markets by enlarging exchange activity and encouraging retail trades. As both consumers and tradesmen, local goldsmiths, long-distance traders, bankers, and money changers played important roles in creating this new age of fashion. In response to a greater public display of luxury goods, civic sumptuary laws were written to curb spending and extreme fashion, but these were aimed at women, youth, and children, leaving townsmen largely unrestricted in their consumption. With erudition, grace, and an evocative selection of illustrations, some reproduced in full color, Susan Mosher Stuard explores the arrival of fashion in European history.
The ideal of balance and its association with what is ordered, just, and healthful remained unchanged throughout the medieval period. The central place allotted to balance in the workings of nature and society also remained unchanged. What changed within the culture of scholasticism, between approximately 1280 and 1360, was the emergence of a greatly expanded sense of what balance is and can be. In this groundbreaking history of balance, Joel Kaye reveals that this new sense of balance and its potentialities became the basis of a new model of equilibrium, shaped and shared by the most acute and innovative thinkers of the period. Through a focus on four disciplines - scholastic economic thought, political thought, medical thought, and natural philosophy - Kaye's book reveals that this new model of equilibrium opened up striking new vistas of imaginative and speculative possibility, making possible a profound re-thinking of the world and its workings.
In Sweets, Tim Richardson takes us on a magical confectionery tour, letting his personal passion fuel the narrative of candy's rich and unusual history. Beginning with a description of the biology of sweetness itself, Richardson navigates the ancient history of sweets, the incredible range and diversity of candies worldwide, the bizarre figures and practices of the confectionery industry, and the connection between food and sex. He goes on to explore the role of sweets in myth and folklore and, finally, offers a personal philosophy of continual sweet-eating based on the writings of Epicurus. "For anyone with a sweet tooth, Sweets is manna...This history of candy is full of delights."-New York Times Book Review "Sweets is an informative, entertaining grab-bag of personal opinion, anecdote and culinary history." -Los Angeles Times
This sixth volume in the AVISTA series considers medieval travel from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, placing the physical practice of transportation in the larger context of medieval thought about the world and its meaning. The papers included cover vehicle design and logistical management, the practicalities of how travellers oriented themselves, and the symbolism of the landscapes and maps created in the Middle Ages.
Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.
The flood of information brought to us by advancing technology is often accompanied by a distressing sense of "information overload," yet this experience is not unique to modern times. In fact, says Ann M. Blair in this intriguing book, the invention of the printing press and the ensuing abundance of books provoked sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European scholars to register complaints very similar to our own. Blair examines methods of information management in ancient and medieval Europe as well as the Islamic world and China, then focuses particular attention on the organization, composition, and reception of Latin reference books in print in early modern Europe. She explores in detail the sophisticated and sometimes idiosyncratic techniques that scholars and readers developed in an era of new technology and exploding information.
This book presents a uniquely broad and pioneering history of premodern toxicology by exploring how late medieval and early modern (c. 1200–1600) physicians discussed the relationship between poison, medicine, and disease. Drawing from a wide range of medical and natural philosophical texts—with an emphasis on treatises that focused on poison, pharmacotherapeutics, plague, and the nature of disease—this study brings to light premodern physicians' debates about the potential existence, nature, and properties of a category of substance theoretically harmful to the human body in even the smallest amount. Focusing on the category of poison (venenum) rather than on specific drugs reframes and remixes the standard histories of toxicology, pharmacology, and etiology, as well as shows how these aspects of medicine (although not yet formalized as independent disciplines) interacted with and shaped one another. Physicians argued, for instance, about what properties might distinguish poison from other substances, how poison injured the human body, the nature of poisonous bodies, and the role of poison in spreading, and to some extent defining, disease. The way physicians debated these questions shows that poison was far from an obvious and uncontested category of substance, and their effort to understand it sheds new light on the relationship between natural philosophy and medicine in the late medieval and early modern periods.