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The Duke and the Stars
The Duke and the Stars explores science and medicine as studied and practiced in fifteenth-century Italy, including how astrology was taught in relation to astronomy. It illustrates how the “predictive art” of astrology was often a critical, secretive source of information for Italian Renaissance rulers, particularly in times of crisis.
About Face
How do we represent ouselves and the cultures we live in? Is it possible to trace any boundaries between reality and self-representation? Because the self represented is the product of a process of selection and choice, in many ways to represent the self is, often simultaneously, to create the self and negate the self. What, then, becomes of the self once it is represented? Because the process of self-representation cumulates in a tangible result and given that any representation of the self is necessarily a construct which aims to render visible or knowable in concrete form the unseen and unknown, self-representation is vulnerable to assessments of its naturalness or artificiality, its hone...
In the Company of Demons
In its interpretation of Latin and Greek culture, Christianity contends that Satan is behind all classical deities, demi-gods, and spiritual creatures, including the gods of the household, the lares and penates. But Armando Maggi, an expert in Renaissance demonology, argues throughout In the Company of Demons that the great thinkers of the Italian Renaissance had a more nuanced and perhaps less sinister interpretation of these creatures or spiritual bodies. Through close readings of Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola, Strozzi Cigogna, Pompeo della Barba, Ludovico Sinistrari, and others, Mag.
Savonarola's Women
Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), the religious reformer, preacher, and Florentine civic leader, was burned at the stake as a false prophet by the order of Pope Alexander VI. Tamar Herzig here explores the networks of Savonarola’s female followers that proliferated in the two generations following his death. Drawing on sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many never before studied, transcribed, or contextualized in Savonarolan scholarship and religious history, Herzig shows how powerful public figures and clerics continued to ally themselves with these holy women long after the prophet’s death. In their quest to stay true to their leader’s teachings, Savonarola’s fema...
At Whom Are We Laughing?
They say that laughter is a purely human phenomenon, so exclusively ours that we brook no intruders except, of course, for the laughing hyena, the laughing jackass (officially known as the kookaburra bird of Australia), laughing matters, laughing gas, or the perennial laughing stock. But what is humor, that funny thing so varied in its colors and tones, so encompassing in its themes, so different from time to time and place to place? And when we poke fun, at whom are we really laughing? At Whom Are We Laughing? Humor in Romance Language Literatures is the selective product of a multi-national gathering of scholars sponsored by Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, to explore humor acros...
Ethnicity and Self-identity
Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 28 contains five original articles exploring topics ranging from medieval ethnicity and self-identity to little-known documents in fifteenth century Italy. In addition to the articles, fourteen review notices examine recent publications in medieval and early modern studies.
White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance
This book explores philosophical theories which in the Renaissance provided an interpretation of nature, of its laws and exceptions and, lastly, of man’s capacity to dominate the cosmos by way of natural magic or by magical ceremonies. It does not concentrate on the Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophers (Ficino, Pico, Della Porta), or on the relationship between magic and the scientific revolution, but rather upon the interference of the ideas and practices of learned magicians with popular rites and also with witchcraft, a most important question for social and religious history. New definitions of magic put forward by certain unorthodox and “wandering scholastics” (Trithemius, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Bruno) will interest readers of Renaissance and Reformation texts and history.
The Defeat of a Renaissance Intellectual
A papal advisor and sixteenth-century power broker, Francesco Guicciardini wrote voluminously throughout his time in service to the Medici. The texts in this volume chart his career chronologically, revealing an intellectual whose philosophy of self-interest failed not only to perceive the interests of others but ultimately to serve his own. During Guicciardini’s life, Florentine politics was dominated by the struggle of republican leaders to retain civic political autonomy against the ambitions of the Medici family. Like Machiavelli and Petrarch, and arguably even Dante, Guicciardini was what Carlo Celli calls an “establishment intellectual,” one whose talents furthered the hegemony o...
Cardano's Cosmos
Girolamo Cardano was an Italian doctor, natural philosopher, and mathematician who became a best-selling author in Renaissance Europe. He was also a leading astrologer of his day, whose predictions won him access to some of the most powerful people in sixteenth-century Europe. In Cardano's Cosmos, Anthony Grafton invites readers to follow this astrologer's extraordinary career and explore the art and discipline of astrology in the hands of a brilliant practitioner.Renaissance astrologers predicted everything from the course of the future of humankind to the risks of a single investment, or even the weather. They analyzed the bodies and characters of countless clients, from rulers to criminal...
Fascism, the War, and Structures of Feeling in Italy, 1943-1945
On July 25, 1943, news of Mussolini's resignation and subsequent arrest stunned Italians leaving them dumbfounded. After two decades, fascism had fallen without any advance warning. As festive events marked the incredible outcome and reminders of the past were destroyed, an uncontainable joy seemed to pervade Italians. But what did people actually celebrate? How did they understand the bygone dictatorship, which was soon to be reincarnated in the Italian Social Republic (RSI)? Drawing on more than one hundred diaries written by ordinary citizens (and some prominent figures as well) and inspired by Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling, the book examines Italians' perspectives o...
