You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
The papers in this volume offer examples of how historians, writers, playwrights, and painters in the early modern period used ancient history as a rich field of raw material that could be used, recycled, and adapted to new needs and purposes. They focused on classical antiquity as a source from which they could recreate the past as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. The contributors to this volume have addressed a number of important, common issues that span a wide range of subjects from fifteenth-century Italian painting to the teaching of Greek history in eighteenth-century Germany. This volume is of interest for historians of the early modern period from all disciplines and for all those interested in the reception of classical antiquity. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.
An interdisciplinary approach, wit hits comparative study of sources, helps to highlight the intellectual preoccupations of many religious thinkers who grappled with the overwhelming prospect of Universal destruction.
Commentaries played an important role in the transmission of the classical heritage. Early modern intellectuals rarely read classical authors in a simple and “direct” form, but generally via intermediary paratexts, especially all kinds of commentaries. Commentaries presented the classical texts in certain ways that determined and guided the readers’ perception and usages of the texts being commented upon. Early modern commentaries shaped not only school and university education and professional scholarship, but also intellectual and cultural life in the broadest sense, including politics, religion, art, entertainment, health care, geographical discoveries etc., and even various professional activities and segments of life that were seemingly far removed from scholarship and learning, such as warfare and engineering. Contributors include: Susanna de Beer, Valéry Berlincourt, Marijke Crab, Jeanine De Landtsheer, Karl Enenkel, Gergő Gellérfi, Trine Arlund Hass, Ekaterina Ilyushechkina, Ronny Kaiser, Marc Laureys, Christoph Pieper, Katharina Suter-Meyer, and Floris Verhaart.
Historians of science often acknowledge the academic status of astrology in the early modern period, but mostly fail to explore its relation with other disciplines and its role in society. This book seeks to fill that gap. The first part of the book examines the practices and functions that shaped late medieval astrology, and relates how its academic status became discredited, both in northern Italy and the Low Countries. The second part of the book examines various counter-strategies of astrological reform, and shows how these ultimately failed to restore public trust in academic astrology. This book provides a new level of detail to the history of astrology. It also establishes important new links with other fields, like the history of universities, humanism, astronomy, medicine, and instrument building.
This volume contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate regarding the reception of Cicero. It focuses on one particular moment in Cicero’s life, the period from the death of Caesar up to Cicero’s own death. These final years have shaped Cicero’s reception in an special way, as they have condensed and enlarged themes that his life stands for: on the positive side his fight for freedom and the republic against mighty opponents (for which he would finally be killed); on the other hand his inconsistency in terms of political alliances and tendency to overestimate his own influence. For that reason, many later readers viewed the final months of Cicero's life as his swan song, and as represe...
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was active during the Renaissance, developing adventurous ideas even while serving as a churchman. The religious issues with which he engaged – spiritual, apocalyptic and institutional – were to play out in the Reformation. These essays reflect the interests of Cusanus but also those of Gerald Christianson, who has studied church history, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The book places Nicholas into his times but also looks at his later reception. The first part addresses institutional issues, including Schism, conciliarism, indulgences and the possibility of dialogue with Muslims. The second treats theological and philosophical themes, including nominalism, time, faith, religious metaphor, and prediction of the end times.
Fear in its many facets appears to constitute an intriguing and compelling subject matter for writers and screenwriters alike. The contributions address fictional representations and explorations of fear in different genres and different periods of literary and cultural history. The topics include representations of political violence and political fear in English Renaissance culture and literature; dramatic representations of fear and anxiety in English Romanticism; the dramatic monologue as an expression of fears in Victorian society; cultural constructions of fear and empathy in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself (2003); facets of children's fears in twentieth- and twenty-first-century stream-of-consciousness fiction; the representation of fear in war movies; the cultural function of horror film remakes; the expulsion of fear in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and fear and nostalgia in Mohsin Hamid's post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Reading Images from the Past is conceived as a Festschrift for Karl Enenkel. The contributors include art historians, literary scholars, and historians, and the topics cover a wide range of periods, countries, and cultural contexts. They explore the complex relation between word and image, consider the rhetorical and hermeneutic functions of various types of image-making, and examine theories and practices of knowledge production across various media. They also reflect on the multi-faceted uses of the past in early modern European culture within debates on art, antiquarian studies, book culture, literature, and historiography. Throughout the volume, special attention is paid to the interacti...
While humanists agreed on identifying the main requirement of the historical genre with truthfulness, they disagreed on their notions of historical truth. Some authors equated historical truth with verisimilitude, thus harmonizing the quest for truth with other ingredients of their histories, such as their political utility and rhetorical aptness. Others, instead, rejected the notion of verisimilitude, identifying historical truth with factuality. Accordingly, they sought to produce bare and exhaustive accounts of all the things that pertained to their historical explorations, often resorting to innovative disciplines, such as archeology, philology, and the history of institutions. The human...