History

The word ''renaissance'', French for ''rebirth'', perfectly describes the intellectual and cultural revival experienced in Europe, starting early in the 14th century and ending early in the 17th century. The Renaissance was a period of intense activity, the fruits of which have had a profoundiimpact on the intellectual history and culture of the whole of Europe and the wider world. Even in the Europe of today there is still much evidence of the enduring influence of the Renaissance--in thought and society as well as in art, architecture, literature, and science.Gordon Campbell, himself the epitome of the Renaissance man, with the help of his team of distinguished consultant and advisory editors, has created a unique new A-Z reference surveying all aspects of the Renaissance in Europe beginning in 1415 and ending at 1618. These dates were not chosenarbitrarily: as well as the year of the battle of Agincourt, 1415 was the year in which Jan Hus was burnt at the stake, his reforming zeal becoming a signal which was to shape the course of European affairs for centuries; 1618 marked the onset of the Thirty Years War, a conflict which sparked yetanother new direction for European history.There are about 4,000 A-Z entries in the text, ranging in length from the very short and concise to the longer and more detailed. These entries cover a wide spectrum of topics including art, literature, science, culture, philosophy, religion, economics, history, and conflict. Over half of theentries are biographical, covering artists, architects, garden designers, philosophers, explorers, royalty, cardinals, reformers, statesman, writers, poets, playwrights, soldiers, rebels, woodcarvers, silversmiths, mystics, mathematicians, sculptors, and composers. The text covers a widegeographical area including all of modern Europe (plus Eastern Europe) except for areas occupied by the Ottomans.Entries include:Biographies -artists (Master of Alkmaar, Sandro Botticelli, Jan Brueghel, Jan van Eyck, Fra Filippo Lippi, Cosimo Rosselli, Leonardo da Vinci, Rogier van der Weyden, Pieter de Witte)composers (Alexander Agricola, Thomas Browne, Peeter Cornet, Leone Leoni, Jean Mouton, Stefano Rossetto)scientists and mathematicians (Christoph Clavius, Giovanni Danti, William Gilbert, Nikolaus Copernicus)playwrights (Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Hans Salat)poets (Anna Bijns, John Donne, Sir Richard Maitland, Niccolo Franco, Hans Sachs)reformers and thinkers (Johann Agricola, Jean Calvin, John Knox, Niccolo Machiavelli)royalty (Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, Anne of France, Mehmet II)sculptors (Donatello, Pierre Bontemps, Claus Berg, Adam Craft, Claus Sluter)others (popes, anti-popes, theologians, statesmen, explorers, navigators, humanists, Protestant reformers, bishops, botanists, herbalists, cardinals, antiquarians, diplomats, engineers, engravers, historians, Jurists, mystics, astrologers, astronomers, philosophers, soldiers, sailors, scholars,writers, rebels, bishops, Huguenot leaders, Music theorists, actors, zoologists, clock makers, clowns)Places -chateaux (Chateau d'' Amboise, Chateau de Chenonceaux, Chateau de Fontainebleau, Gaillon)cities and states (Amsterdam, Flanders, Frankfurt, Florence, Geneva, Heidelberg, Jena, London, Madrid, Naples, Oxford, Pisa, Rome, Sardinia, Savoy)countries (Algiers, Denmark, England, Estonia, France, Holland, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Wales)continents (Asia, Europe)Themes -architecture (Dutch architecture, Flemish architecture, fountains, French architecture, marble, architectural orders, Spanish architecture)art (Bohemian art, bronze sculptures, Danish art, drypoint, etching, fresco, genre painting, Italian art, landscape painting, tempera)crafts (needlework, pottery, quilting, tiles, weaving)furniture (beds, cabinets, chairs, settles, and stools)general life and culture (Barbary pirates, coins, cookery, dentistry, gypsies, hospitals, magic, playing cards, tombs and mausoleums, torture, umbrellas and parasols)drama (dance, comedy, English drama, French drama)economy (guilds, banking, interest)gardens (botanical gardens, French gardens, Knot gardens, pavilion, topiary)health and medicine (Bethlem hospital, plague, syphilis, typhus)language (French language, Greek language, Italian language, Occitan language and literature)law (civil law, Dutch law, international law, maritime law)literature (Catalan literature, English literature, French literature, poet laureate)music (claviorganum, cornett, Danish music, harpsichord, musical notation, opera, Spanish music)printing and writing (book binding, book blocks, book covers, engraving, etching, Giunti press, imprints, woodcut)religion (Baptism, Bible, Book of Common Prayer, Brownists, Calvinism, God, Holy League, Swiss Brethren)science (astronomy, geometry, logarithms, sundials, technology, trigonometry)war (arms and armour, battle of Cascina, crusades, daggers, gunpowder, musket, Thirty Years War, battle of Tunis, wars of religion)The book will be highly illustrated with 100 black-and-white integrated pictures. The main text is also supplemented with four appendices and a thematic index.

A great work of literature as well as history, this is a classic introduction to the study of the Renaissance, and one that is still a source of inspiration.

For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.

The Renaissance in Italy continues to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination and on scholarly enquiry. This Companion presents a lively, comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and current approach to the period that extends in Italy from the turn of the fourteenth century through the latter decades of the sixteenth. Addressed to students, scholars, and non-specialists, it introduces the richly varied materials and phenomena as well as the different methodologies through which the Renaissance is studied today both in the English-speaking world and in Italy. The chapters are organized around axes of humanism, historiography, and cultural production, and cover a wide variety of areas including literature, science, music, religion, technology, artistic production, and economics. The diffusion of the Renaissance throughout Italian territories is emphasized. Overall, the Companion provides an essential overview of a period that witnessed both a significant revalidation of the classical past and the development of new, vernacular, and increasingly secular values.

In this fascinating study, Alison Cole explores the distinctive uses of art at the five great secular courts of Naples, Urbino, Ferrara, Mantua, and Milan. The princes who ruled these city-states, vying with each other and with the great European courts, relied on artistic patronage to promote their legitimacy and authority. Major artists and architects, from Mantegna and Pisanello to Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci, were commissioned to design, paint, and sculpt, but also to oversee thecourt's building projects and entertainments. The courtly styles that emerged from this intricate landscape are examined in detail, as are the complex motivations of ruling lords, consorts, nobles, and their artists. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, Cole presents a vivid picture of the art of this extraordinary period.

In this newly revised edition of his widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions that existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and he analyzes the ways of thinking and seeing that characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive approach, the author is concerned not only with the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and others, but also with the social background, patterns of recruitment, and means of subsistence of this "cultural elite." He thus makes a major contribution both to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance and to our comprehension of the complex relations between culture and society.

These essays consider both architecture and urban planning in late medieval and Renaissance Italy, and French and German Renaissance architecture, stage designs and the relationship of architecture with the other arts. The works are analyzed historically from the viewpoint of both the humanist Renaissance theories and of modern critical reappraisals. Reproducing and describing numerous designs, projects and manuscripts by Brunelleschi, Alberti, Michelangelo and Bramante among others, this volume presents a panorama of civil and religious masterworks by those who created European architecture

This volume brings together some of the most exciting renaissance scholars to suggest new ways of thinking about the period and to set a new series of agendas for Renaissance scholarship. Overturns the idea that it was a period of European cultural triumph and highlights the negative as well as the positive. Looks at the Renaissance from a world, as opposed to just European, perspective. Views the Renaissance from perspectives other than just the cultural elite. Gender, sex, violence, and cultural history are integrated into the analysis.

This volume brings together some of the latest research on the cultural, intellectual, and commercial interactions during the Renaissance between Western Europe and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Ottoman Empire. Recent scholarship has brought to the fore the economic, political, cultural, and personal interactions between Western European Christian states and the Eastern Mediterranean Islamic states, and has therefore highlighted the incongruity of conceiving of an iron curtain bisecting the mentalities of the various socio-political and religious communities located in the same Euro-Mediterranean space. Instead, the emphasis here is on interpreting the Mediterranean as a world traversed by trade routes and associated cultural and intellectual networks through which ideas, people and goods regularly travelled. The fourteen articles in this volume contribute to an exciting cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary scholarly dialogue that explores elements of continuity and exchange between the two areas and positions the Ottoman Empire as an integral element of the geo-political and cultural continuum within which the Renaissance evolved. The aim of this volume is to refine current understandings of the diverse artistic, intellectual and political interactions in the early modern Mediterranean world and, in doing so, to contribute further to the discussion of the scope and nature of the Renaissance. The articles, from major scholars of the field, include discussions of commercial contacts; the exchange of technological, cartographical, philosophical, and scientific knowledge; the role of Venice in transmitting the culture of the Islamic East Mediterranean to Western Europe; the use of Middle Eastern objects in the Western European Renaissance; shared sources of inspiration in Italian and Ottoman architecture; musical exchanges; and the use of East Mediterranean sources in Western scholarship and European sources in Ottoman scholarship.

The new edition of this classic history examines the political,economic, social, religious and cultural life of Europe at theheight of the Renaissance. J.R. Hale not only records the events of1480-1520, but also suggests what it was like to have lived in thisperiod. He provides readers with an understanding of the quality oflives of people living at this time and includes processes andpersonalities not often covered by other books. For the secondedition Professor Michael Mallet provides an updated bibliographyand an extended introduction explaining the book's place in thehistoriography of the subject. The book is arranged thematically, each chapter designed toprovide information about a specific field of inquiry and also givean insight into the people of this era. J. R. Hale investigates howthese people felt about their environment and the passage of time;their relationships with government and other institutions, fromthe Church to the family; their economic frameworks; the partreligion played in their lives; and what cultural and intellectualpursuits were available to them. Renaissance Europe compares our own attitudes to those ofthe Renaissance and vice versa, thereby enriching the readersunderstanding of everyday life in the past.

Michelangelo is universally recognized to be one of the greatest artists of all time. In this vividly written biography, William E. Wallace offers a substantially new view of the artist. Not only a supremely gifted sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo was also an aristocrat who firmly believed in the ancient and noble origins of his family. The belief in his patrician status fueled his lifelong ambition to improve his family's financial situation and to raise the social standing of artists. Michelangelo's ambitions are evident in his writing, dress, and comportment, as well as in his ability to befriend, influence, and occasionally say "no" to popes, kings, and princes. Written from the words of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, this biography not only tells his own stories but also brings to life the culture and society of Renaissance Florence and Rome. Not since Irving Stone's novel The Agony and the Ecstasy has there been such a compelling and human portrayal of this remarkable yet credible human individual.

This updated version of Humanism and the Northern Renaissance now includes over 60 documents exploring humanist and Renaissance ideals, the zeal of religion, and the wealth of the new world. Together, the sources illuminate the chaos and brilliance of the historical period—as well as its failures and inconsistencies.The reader has been thoroughly revised to meet the needs of the undergraduate classroom. Over 30 historical documents have been added, including material by Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, William Shakespeare, Christopher Columbus, Miguel de Cervantes, and Galileo Galilei. In the introduction, Bartlett and McGlynn identify humanism as the central expression of the European Renaissance and explain how this idea migrated from Italy to northern Europe. The editors also emphasize the role of the church and Christianity in northern Europe and detail the events leading up to the Reformation. A short essay on how to read historical documents is included.

Carlsmith's A Renaissance Education uses a case study approach to examine educational practices in the north-eastern Italian city of Bergamo from 1500 to 1650.