Product Description: The Renaissance and the Postmodern reconsiders postmodern readings of Renaissance texts by engaging in a dialectics the authors call comparative critical values. Rather than concede the contemporary hierarchy of theory over literature, the book takes the novel approach of consulting major Renaissance writers about the values at work in postmodern representations of early modern culture...read more

"Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of ""critical posthumanisms"" in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today's ""critical posthumanisms,"" even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if ""the human"" is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny ""contemporary""-and ally-of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism."

Product Description: Between the medieval conception of Christendom and the political visions of modernity, ideas of Europe underwent a transformative and catalytic period that saw a cultural process of renewed self-definition or self-Europeanization...read more

Product Description: This classic work marks the culmination of a definite stage in the socio-economic historiography from the late Middle Ages to the rise of the haute bourgeoisie in the early Renaissance. Here Alfred von Martin attempts to discover and define the spirit or essence of the Renaissance, and with it the spirit of early capitalism as it arose in Florence...read more

In this study Peter Burke distances himself from the traditional interpretation of the Renaissance as essentially Italian, self-consciously modern and easily separable from the Middle Ages. He emphasises the survival of medieval traditions and the process of the creative adaptation of classical forms and values to their new cultural and social contexts in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. The story is carried down to the seventeenth century and the diffusion and disintegration of what had once been a coherent movement. Illustrated with black and white plates, this edition has been updated throughout to take account of recent scholarship, has a fully revised bibliography and will provide the student with a stimulating introduction to the subject.

Product Description: Plague and Pleasure is a lively popular history that introduces a new hypothesis about the impetus behind the cultural change in Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance coincided with a period of chronic, constantly recurring plague, unremitting warfare and pervasive insecurity...read more

Product Description: We know the Renaissance as a key period in the history of Europe. It saw the development of court and urban cultures, witnessed the first global voyages of discovery and gave rise to the Reformation and Counter Reformation. It also started with the 'invention' of oil painting, linear perspective and moveable type, all visual technologies...read more

Product Description: This beautifully illustrated new color edition of the classic New York Times bestseller brings readers more intimately into the medieval world than ever before. From tales of chivalry and valor to the barbarity of the Inquisition and the devastation of the plague, no era has been a greater source of fascination and horror than the Middle Ages...read more

Product Description: This book argues that the Renaissance, an era long associated with the historical development of individualism, in fact witnessed the emergence of radically new concepts of group identity. From the end of the fifteenth century, rapidly accelerating globalization intensified cross-cultural encounters, destabilized older categories of large- and small-group identity, and contributed to the rise of new hybrid group concepts...read more

How much did the Renaissance change medical history and public health? Did landmark developments benefit the everyday lives of ordinary people? This book looks at the new 'scientific' ways of learning and experimentation of the period, to show what health and disease were like in the Old and New Worlds.

Product Description: Features. The Renaissance was a time of cultural rebirth. Readers will learn all about Renaissance life and Renaissance education in this engaging title that explores how artists created masterpieces and explored subjects like music architecture and Renaissance religion and new artistic movements like naturalism...read more

Product Description: Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe discusses the cultural and artistic interaction between the Byzantine east and western Europe, from the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to the flourishing of post-Byzantine artistic workshops on Venetian Crete during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the formation of icon collections in Renaissance Italy...read more

Product Description: Andrei Pippidi follows ideas of the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries and ties the roots of these images to patterns in Western intellectualism. A pathbreaking book, his volume reconsiders the writing of Erasmus, Luther, and Machiavelli -- individuals we consider intellectuals, yet who largely did not travel or have direct contact with the Ottoman Empire...read more

Product Description: Early Modern Europe was teeming with impostors. Identity theft was only one form of misrepresentation: royal pretenders, envoys from imaginary lands, religious dissimulators, cross-dressers, false Gypsies - all these caused deep anxiety, leading authorities to invent increasingly sophisticated means for unmasking deception...read more

Product Description: This book offers a series of explorations of the cultural interactions (social, political, economic, religious and artistic) that were instrumental in articulating how the empires of Byzantium and the West each defined themselves amid and against one another.

Product Description: The Renaissance produced a remarkable transformation of European society and culture. In education and in government, in wealth and in the visual arts, the Renaissance produced major changes in almost every area of European lifechanges which even today continue to affect the way people live, work, and think...read more