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In Italy, the powerful Borromeo family of Milan have long been held up as a rare example of paternalist aristocrats who withstood the temptations of self-enrichment so many of their peers succumbed to during the period of Spanish rule. Aristocratic Power in the Spanish Monarchy, the first major study of the family in the seventeenth century, challenges this myth and explains how it came about. Based on research in the previously inaccessible Borromeo private papers, the volume details the Borromeo's increasing involvement with, and dependence on, the patronage of the kings of Spain. At the center of the analysis are the ways in which one family sought to rationalize and conceal this controve...
“This book is nothing less than the definitive study of a text long considered central to understanding the Renaissance and its place in Western culture.” —James Hankins, Harvard University Pico della Mirandola died in 1494 at the age of thirty-one. During his brief and extraordinary life, he invented Christian Kabbalah in a book that was banned by the Catholic Church after he offered to debate his ideas on religion and philosophy with anyone who challenged him. Today he is best known for a short speech, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486 but never delivered. Sometimes called a “Manifesto of the Renaissance,” this text has been regarded as the foundation of humanism...
This book details original case studies that represent five different social positions or characterisations of opera: namely, opera as social showcase from Bayreuth (1748), social distinction from Ljubljana (1887), social conflict from Brno (1920), social status from Mantua (1999) and social manifest from Belgrade (2005). These positions, which indicate opera’s social diversity in local, regional, provincial, and peripheral terms, as well as its social mutuality in international, transnational, global, or metropolitan terms, generally promote the idea of opera as a social venue, cultural practice, theatrical scene, lyrical site, musical place, artistic experience, or transgenerational phen...