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Anyone who has studied the history of the Reformation, the book and communication will have come across or been influenced by Andrew Pettegree’s contributions to these fields. The essays in this Festschrift have been commissioned to cover the broad scope of Pettegree’s areas of interest and expertise, and to reflect and build upon them. The pieces, written by forty-three scholars based at over thirty institutions, are organised around nine key themes, ranging from the intersections of religion and print to the history of book collecting, the periodical press and pioneering book historical research methodologies. This second volume contains twenty-seven essays. Together with the first vol...
Bringing together a broad range of case studies written by a team of international scholars, this Concise Companion establishes how manuscripts and printed books met the needs of two different approaches to literacy in the early modern period. Features essays illustrating the particular ways a manuscript and a printed book reflect the different emphases of an elite, private and an egalitarian, public culture, both of which account for the literary achievements of the Renaissance Includes wide-ranging essays, from printing the Gospels in Arabic to a contemporary reconceptualization of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus Increases accessibility through a rubric organized around archival and manuscr...
A new history of one of the foremost printers of the Renaissance explores how the Age of Print came to Italy. Lorenz Bninger offers a fresh history of the birth of print in Italy through the story of one of its most important figures, Niccol di Lorenzo della Magna. After having worked for several years for a judicial court in Florence, Niccol established his business there and published a number of influential books. Among these were Marsilio FicinoÕs De christiana religione, Leon Battista AlbertiÕs De re aedificatoria, Cristoforo LandinoÕs commentaries on DanteÕs Commedia, and Francesco BerlinghieriÕs Septe giornate della geographia. Many of these books were printed in vernacular...
This collection of essays engages with a variety of aspects of early modern book culture in the 16th-17th centuries, considered in the Catholic context. The contributions reflect on the engagement of institutions and authorities in the process of book production, bringing to the fore the role of networks in this process; show the book as a tool of resistance to the Protestant Reformation; give insight into the content and design of book collections; showcase textual production in the context of cultural appropriation and shed light on the role of the image in the propagation of Catholicism. Together the sixteen contributions demonstrate the diversity of the Catholic book in its forms and functions, in various social and national contexts.
Constraint on Trial examines the life and thought of Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert (1522-1990). The self-made Coornhert was a notary, secretary, artist, poet, playwright, translator, theologian, but most of all, he was an intrepid controversialist, "born to contradict", indefatigable in his critique of the public church and sects. His main concern in polemics and disputations was the defense of freedom of conscience and advocacy of toleration. Coornhert's individualism made him eschew any restrictions on personal religious choice. His tolerationist writings, especially Synod on the Freedom of Conscience (1582) and Trial of the Killing of Heretics(1590), were rooted in his spiritualist belief system. He found inspiration in other protagonists of religious freedom, such as Sebastian Franck and Castellio, but his ideas were uniquely Coornhertian. He possessed an unrelenting drive to combat constraint, and regarded himself as "God's battering ram, meant to break down the prison of men's conscience".
Silent Teachers considers for the first time the influence of Ottoman scholarly practices and reference tools on oriental learning in early modern Europe. Telling the story of oriental studies through the annotations, study notes, and correspondence of European scholars, it demonstrates the central but often overlooked role that Turkish-language manuscripts played in the achievements of early orientalists. Dispersing the myths and misunderstandings found in previous scholarship, this book offers a fresh history of Turkish studies in Europe and new insights into how Renaissance intellectuals studied Arabic and Persian through contemporaneous Turkish sources. This story hardly has any dull mom...
Samuel Rogers began his diary before his twenty-first birthday. He expresses his intense loneliness as chaplain to the unsatisfactory Dennys of Bishops Stortford, and his efforts to obtain comfort from the nearby godly community - including visits to Wethersfield, where his father was lecturer.
René Descartes's Regulae ad directionem ingenii ('Rules for the Direction of the Understanding') is his earliest surviving philosophical treatise, and in many respects his most puzzling text. It is a profoundly original work with few intellectual precursors, and offers the fullest account anywhere in Descartes's work of his theory of method. Yet Descartes left it unfinished, and unpublished, at his death in 1650. The versions currently known to modern readers are all posthumous: a manuscript copied for Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, a Dutch translation of 1684, and the version printed in 1701 in Amsterdam. As a result, the details and date of its composition, its fragmentary, unfi...
Fascinated with the heritage of ancient Greece, early modern intellectuals cultivated a deep interest in its language, the primary gateway to this long-lost culture, rehabilitated during the Renaissance. Inspired by the humanist battle cry “To the sources!” scholars took a detailed look at the Greek source texts in the original language and its different dialects. In so doing, they saw themselves confronted with major linguistic questions: Is there any order in this immense diversity? Can the Ancient Greek dialects be classified into larger groups? Is there a hierarchy among the dialects? Which dialect is the oldest? Where should problematic varieties such as Homeric and Biblical Greek be placed? How are the differences between the Greek dialects to be described, charted, and explained? What is the connection between the diversity of the Greek tongue and the Greek homeland? And, last but not least, are Greek dialects similar to the dialects of the vernacular tongues? Why (not)? This book discusses and analyzes the often surprising and sometimes contradictory early modern answers to these questions.
A pathbreaking history of early modern education argues that Europe’s oldest university, often seen as a bastion of traditionalism, was in fact a vibrant site of intellectual innovation and cultural exchange. The University of Bologna was among the premier universities in medieval Europe and an international magnet for students of law. However, a long-standing historiographical tradition holds that Bologna—and Italian university education more broadly—foundered in the early modern period. On this view, Bologna’s curriculum ossified and its prestige crumbled, due at least in part to political and religious pressure from Rome. Meanwhile, new ways of thinking flourished instead in human...