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This book takes as its starting point a striking paradox: that the antique tradition of the art of memory -- created by an oral culture -- reached its moment of greatest diffusion during an age that saw the birth of the printed book.
The sense of reading as an intimate act of self-discovery--and of communion between authors and book lovers--has a long history. Lina Bolzoni returns to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso, exploring how Renaissance humanists began to represent reading as a private encounter and a dialogue across barriers of time and space.
Through her investigation of the mnemonic role of images in vernacular preaching and in mystical texts, Lina Bolzoni moves beyond the traditional art-historical approach to late Mediaeval and Renaissance art which tends to concentrate on style and iconography. offers new ways of reconstructing their meaning. By bringing her knowledge of rhetoric and the art of memory to bear on the visual arts she opens up new perspectives for the study of religious art and literature of the Renaissance, and shows how these images actually functioned within the everyday context of the liturgy and of the life of the common people.
Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going à rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante’s humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and...
Sansovino successively dismantled and reconstituted the categories of art-making. Hardly capable of sustaining a program of reform, the experimental art of this period was succeeded by a new era of cultural codification in the second half of the sixteenth century. --
The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) has become a leader in the dialogue between Jews and Catholics as was manifested in the role that the Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea played in the adoption by the Second Vatican Council of Nostra Aetate, the charter for that new relationship. Still the encounters between Jesuits and Jews were often characterized by animosity and this historical record made them a tragic couple, related but estranged. This volume is the first examination of the complex interactions between Jesuits and Jews from the early modern period in Europe and Asia through the twentieth century where special attention is focused on the historical context of the Holocaust.
Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) is one of the most fascinating, if hitherto inaccessible, intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance. His work ranges across many of the intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political concerns of that tumultuous era. John Headley uses Campanella's life and works to open a window into this complex period. He not only explicates the frequently contradictory texts of a prolific author but also situates Campanella's writings amidst the larger currents of European thought. For all its obscurely magical and astrolgocial intricacies, Campanella's entire intellectual endeavor expresses an effort to impose a distinctive order and direction upon the major issues and forces of...
A unique book! Italian women at their best! What talent! This book is a must read for everyone who loves Italian culture and those who appreciate talented women. Extensively researched with hundreds of references, it is a comprehensive encyclopedic analysis highlighting the length and breadth of Italy’s most incredibly talented women, including 114 writers, 56 opera singers, 63 other singers, 55 musicians, 52 film icons, 39 fashion designers, 59 medical women, 40 chefs, 47 artists, 23 academics and 114 sportswomen, amongst others. All discussed in chronological order in each of their fields with many interesting stories, including a chapter on the emigration of impressive female Italian talent.
In June 2012, scholars from a number of disciplines and countries gathered in Stockholm to discuss the representation of ancient mythology in Renaissance Europe. This symposium was an opportunity for the participants to cross disciplinary borders and to problematize a well-researched field. The aim was to move beyond a view of mythology as mere propaganda in order to promote an understanding of ancient tales and fables as contemporary means to explain and comprehend the Early Modern world. W ...
This is the 1st volume in a 4-volume work entitled The Mage’s Images. The work provides the first in-depth examination of the life and works of Heinrich Khunrath (1560-1605), ‘one of the great Hermetic philosophers’, whose Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1595/1609) has been described as ‘one of the most important books in the whole literature of theosophical alchemy and the occult sciences’. Khunrath is best known for his novel combination of ‘scripture and picture’ in the complex engravings in his Amphitheatre. In this richly illustrated monograph, Forshaw analyses occult symbolism, with previously unpublished material, offering insight into Khunrath’s insistence on the necessary combination of alchemy, magic, and cabala in ‘Oratory and Laboratory’.