You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This work offers the first English-language survey of the book industry in Renaissance Italy. Whereas traditional accounts of the book in the Renaissance celebrate authors and literary achievement, this study examines the nuts and bolts of a rapidly expanding trade that built on existing economic practices while developing new mechanisms in response to political and religious realities. Approaching the book trade from the perspective of its publishers and booksellers, this archive-based account ranges across family ambitions and warehouse fires to publishers' petitions and convivial bookshop conversation. In the process it constructs a nuanced picture of trading networks, production, and the distribution and sale of printed books, a profitable but capricious commodity. Originally published in Italian as Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998; second, revised ed., 2003), this present English translation has not only been updated but has also been deeply revised and augmented.
Molho (European history, Brown U.) shows that the propertied families of late-medieval and early-modern Florence maintained their power and influence through arranged marriage and the dowry. While elsewhere in Europe the elite were toppling under the onslaught of commerce and personal freedom, in Florence they married carefully within a narrow and well-defined class, used dowries as both speculation and instruments of manipulation, and remembered every detail for a long time. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Ambitious, extravagant, progressive, and sexually notorious, Galeazzo Maria Sforza inherited the ducal throne of Milan in 1466, at the age of twenty-two. Although his reign ended tragically only ten years later, the young prince's court was a dynamic community where arts, policy making, and the panoply of state were integrated with the rhythms and preoccupations of daily life. Gregory Lubkin explores this vital but overlooked center of power, allowing the members of the Milanese court to speak for themselves and showing how dramatically Milan and its ruler exemplified the political, cultural, religious, and economic aspirations of Renaissance Italy.
A biography of the fifteenth-century explorer, describing his lifelong interest in the sea and his voyages of discovery to the New World.
Discover the life and voyages of Christopher Columbus, Italian navigator who discovered the West Indies.
This study examines a significant development within late medieval and early modern European government, set in the context of the tense relations between the young Emperor Charles V and his ageing chancellor Mercurino de Gattrina. It focuses upon an important transformation in the administrative reorganisation of European monarchies: the shift in the political centre of gravity from the medieval institution of the chancellery as the secretariat for all government business and authentication to a small group of secretaries, the minister of a later age, acting directly in collaboration with the prince. In the collision between the traditional judicial and administrative pre-eminence of the late medieval chancellor and the new secretaries as expediters of the Renaissance prince's will. Charles gave his support to the latter, thus associating himself with the previous work of Ferdinand the Catholic. Against the background of this struggle with the state secretaries the imperial chancellery is analysing in its relations to the individual chancelleries of Charles V's disparate lands.
A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy offers readers unfamiliar with Southern Italy an introduction to different aspects of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history and culture of this vast and significant area of Europe, situated at the center of the Mediterranean. Commonly regarded as a backward, rural region untouched by the Italian Renaissance, the essays in this volume paint a rather different picture. The expert-written contributions present a general survey of the most recent research on the centers of southern Italy, as well as insight into the ground-breaking debates on wider themes, such as the definition of the city, continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the s...
Modern Italian historiography has undergone a substantial revision in the last quarter of a century. From an almost exclusive focus on the process of nation-building, the attention of historians has shifted. The most innovative research is now devoted to assessing to what extent the cosmopolitan attitude that was evident in the late eighteenth century morphed, but did not disappear, in the ensuing two centuries. The essays in this volume make the case that the age of nations had a profound impact on Italian history and contributed to the creation of an Italian identity within the framework of well-functioning imperial and global networks. They also acknowledge that the process of national individualization carried with it a variety of aspects that reconnected Italian history to the foreign cultures that were undergoing constant self-fashioning. Cosmopolitan Italy in the Age of Nations: Transnational Visions from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century will be of interest to scholars throughout the world and intellectual and transnational historians.
This magnificent compendium is the fourth in a series of catalogues describing selections of rare books and other material in the Oak Spring Garden Library, a collection assembled by Mrs. Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon. Herbaria describes sixty-three books and manuscripts about herbs and includes exquisite illustrations selected from the works themselves. Spanning the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, and featuring works by Brunfels, Culpeper, Monardes, and Linnaeus, among others, this authoritative catalogue will prove fascinating to botanists, bibliophiles, garden historians, and herbalists alike.