Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Portraits from the Age of Exploration
The selections, twelve chapters from Thevet's original work, describe the exploits of six famous European explorers and six Native American chiefs. The explorers are Columbus, Magellan, Cortes, Pizarro, Albuquerque, and Vespucci; the chiefs are Montezuma, Atahualpa, Nacol-absou (King of the Promontory of the Cannibals), Paracoussi Satoriona (King of the Platte), and Quoniambec. The biographies of Native Americans represented a first in European literature. Thevet's information came from written and oral sources, from his own experience as a colonist in Brazil, and from other eyewitness accounts.
AndrŽ Thevet's North America
André Thevet was one of the most widely travelled Frenchmen of the sixteenth century, visiting almost all the main countries and regions of western Europe, the Near East, and Brazil. He served four consecutive French kings, beginning with Henry II, as Royal Cosmographer and "garde des singularitez." As cosmographer, he wrote three major books dealing with the discovery and subsequent exploration of the New World: Les Singularitez de la France antarctique (1556), La Cosmographie universelle (1575), and the Grand Insulaire (unpublished, 1586). Although the portions of these works devoted to South America have received considerable attention from scholars, Thevet's work on North America has remained inaccessible to students of the Age of Discovery. Professors Schlesinger and Stabler have now added Thevet to the list of enjoyable books by early European explorers of North America.
André Thevet's North America
André Thevet was one of the most widely travelled Frenchmen of the sixteenth century, visiting almost all the main countries and regions of western Europe, the Near East, and Brazil. He served four consecutive French kings, beginning with Henry II, as Royal Cosmographer and "garde des singularitez." As cosmographer, he wrote three major books dealing with the discovery and subsequent exploration of the New World: Les Singularitez de la France antarctique (1556), La Cosmographie universelle (1575), and the Grand Insulaire (unpublished, 1586). Although the portions of these works devoted to South America have received considerable attention from scholars, Thevet's work on North America has remained inaccessible to students of the Age of Discovery. Professors Schlesinger and Stabler have now added Thevet to the list of enjoyable books by early European explorers of North America.
Portraits from the French Renaissance and the Wars of Religion
Available for the first time in English, these thirteen selections from André Thevet’s Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres offer a glimpse of France during a time of great upheaval. Originally published in 1584, Thevet’s collection contains over two hundred biographical sketches, detailing the lives of important persons from antiquity to the sixteenth century. Edward Benson and Roger Schlesinger have translated and annotated Thevet’s portraits of his contemporaries, and divided them into three categories: monarchs, aristocrats, and scholars. Additionally, an extensive introduction places the work in context and describes the critical attention that Thevet and his writings have received. Together these portraits provide a history of sixteenth-century France as the country underwent tremendous change: from an intellectual renaissance and its first encounter with the New World to the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion that followed. France was irrevocably altered by these events and Thevet’s account of the lives of individuals who struggled with them is indispensable.
Making Space
The cosmos was bound in a sphere; the world was gridded and plotted, the seas navigated, and the land surveyed. Spatial practices were codified, a spatial sensitivity was created and a cartographic literacy was established in the increasing use of maps and the creation of a cartographic language for new mappings of the world, state, and city. Short establishes that such spatial revisioning is connected to the promotion of commercial and national interests. Developments in navigation, for example, were often encouraged and promoted both by the state and by merchant companies. Surveying was closely connected to the rising cost of land and to the increasing commodification of agriculture. The continuous price rise of land in the sixteenth century was an important factor in the rise of spatial practices of mapping and surveying. In addition, he highlights the role of the occult practices in the new spatial sciences. Astrology and alchemy were as important as astronomy and geometry. The cosmographers of the sixteenth century encompassed a wide arc of intellectual endeavors.
Birthing Bodies in Early Modern France
The pregnant, birthing, and nurturing body is a recurring topos in early modern French literature. Such bodies, often metaphors for issues and anxieties obtaining to the gendered control of social and political institutions, acquired much of their descriptive power from contemporaneous medical and scientific discourse. In this study, Kirk Read brings together literary and medical texts that represent a range of views, from lyric poets, satirists and polemicists, to midwives and surgeons, all of whom explore the popular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century narratives of birth in France. Although the rhetoric of birthing was widely used, strategies and negotiations depended upon sex and ge...
A New History of French Literature
Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by ...
