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The classical tradition -- Renaissance antihero: Leon Battista Alberti's Momus, the novel -- Momus and the Reformation -- The execution of Giordano Bruno -- Milton's Lucifer -- God of modern criticks -- Momus and modernism
This study examines the transmission and transformation of commonplace wisdom in Renaissance humanism by tracing a series of filiations between classical sayings, anecdotes, and exampes and Renaissance poems, essays, and fictions. The circulation of commonplaces can be understood either as a process of reanimation and revitalization, where frozen sayings thaw out and come to life, or conversely as a process of immobilization and incrustation that petrifies tradition. The paradigmatic figure for this process is the proverbial dance around the well, which expresses both the danger and the compulsion of borrowed speech.
Drawing on the classical concept of rhetorical "dispositio," this study gives new interpretations of a number of literary texts of the French Renaissance (Rabelais, Du Bellay, Montaigne and others). The often problematic ordering of these texts is studied from a variety of perspectives, historical, theoretical and cultural.
In the late sixteenth century, the French royal court was mobile. To distinguish itself from the rest of society, it depended more on its cultural practices and attitudes than on the royal and aristocratic palaces it inhabited. Using courtly song-or the air de cour-as a window, Jeanice Brooks offers an unprecedented look into the culture of this itinerant institution. Brooks concentrates on a period in which the court's importance in projecting the symbolic centrality of monarchy was growing rapidly and considers the role of the air in defining patronage hierarchies at court and in enhancing courtly visions of masculine and feminine virtue. Her study illuminates the court's relationship to the world beyond its own confines, represented first by Italy, then by the countryside. In addition to the 40 editions of airs de cour printed between 1559 and 1589, Brooks draws on memoirs, literary works, and iconographic evidence to present a rounded vision of French Renaissance culture. The first book-length examination of the history of air de cour, this work also sheds important new light on a formative moment in French history.
Focusing upon the extraordinary circumstances of the production of the editio princeps of the Syriac New Testament in 1555 and establishing a reliable history of that edition, this book offers an new account of the origin of Syriac studies in Europe and a fresh evaluation of Catholic Orientalism in the sixteenth century. The reception of Syriac into the West is shown to have been characterised, under the influence of Egidio da Viterbo and Postel, by a Christian Kabbalistic world-view which also determined the reception of other Oriental languages. The companion volume The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible exhibits the continuing influence of Christian Kabbalism on later editions.
Obscene poetry, servants' slanders against their masters, the diabolical acts of those who committed massacre and regicide. This is a book about the harmful, outward manifestation of inner malice—villainy—in French culture (1463-1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining the methods of legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies...
The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which wer...
Critical edition of previously unpublished works by a key philosopher of the fifteenth-century Low Countries Peter de Rivo (c.1420–1499), a renowned philosopher active at the University of Leuven, is today mostly remembered for his controversial role in the quarrel over future contingents (1465–1475). Much less known are his contributions to historical chronology, in particular his attempts to determine the dates of Christ’s birth and death. In 1471, Peter made an original contribution to this long-standing discussion with his Dyalogus de temporibus Christi, which reconciles conflicting views by rewriting the history of the Jewish and Christian calendars. Later in his career, Peter tackled the issue of calendar reform in his Reformacio kalendarii Romani (1488) and engaged in a heated debate with Paul of Middelburg on the chronology of Christ. This book edits the Dyalogus and Reformacio and sets out their context and transmission in an extensive historical introduction.
Die Wirkung Martin Luthers auf den Calvinismus war enorm. In diesem Band dokumentieren namhafte Autoren auf dem Gebiet der Lutherforschung und der reformierten Theologie die internationale Forschung zur Rezeption Martin Luthers im Calvinismus. Umfassend analysieren sie das Bild Luthers in unterschiedlichen calvinistischen Kontexten. Als Experten gelingt es ihnen, die zentralen Zusammenhänge zwischen lutherischem und calvinistischem Denken nachvollziehbar und präzise aufzuzeigen. Mit ihrem nachdrücklichen Hinweis auf die immense Wirkung Luthers auf den Calvinismus leisten sie insgesamt einen Meilenstein auf dem Weg zur Erforschung der Bedeutung Martin Luthers für die Geistesgeschichte Europas.
In this volume, George Hoffmann presents a study of Protestant satirical texts in sixteenth-century France and their role in French literature and history, examining how France became a culturally Protestant country while remaining confessionally Catholic.