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The Accademia Pontaniana
The Accademia Pontaniana: A Model of a Humanist Network is an exploration of the vast intellectual networks which developed around the fifteenth century humanist Pontano. It includes the densely knit network which emerged in Naples, the Accademia Pontaniana, as well as the loosely knit networks which developed between the members of this academy and other humanists and academies outside of Naples. Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi points to the links between the Accademia Pontaniana and other sodalities in Southern Italy, and to the lineage between fifteenth century informal academies and sixteenth century institutional Academies. In this study recent sociological theory is applied to understand Renaissance academies and the vertical and horizontal links between them.
The Hermaphrodite
The Hermaphrodite's open celebration of vice, particularly sodomy, earned it public burnings, threats of excommunication, banishment to the closed sections of libraries, and a devoted following. Beccadelli combined the comic realism of Italian popular verse with the language of Martial to explore the underside of the early Renaissance.
Jews and Magic in Medici Florence
In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanisa businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynastysought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truthespecially historical truthcan be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.
Worlds Made by Words
Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically-produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and ...
Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews
A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscape Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism. Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly fo...
Writing the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages
An examination of four written accounts of medieval pilgrimages to Jerusalem. What do the bursar of Eton College, a canon of Mainz Cathedral, a young knight from near Cologne, and a Kentish nobleman's chaplain have in common? Two Germans, residents of the Holy Roman Empire, and two Englishmen, just as the western horizons of the known world were beginning to expand. These four men - William Wey, Bernhard von Breydenbach, Arnold von Harff, and Thomas Larke - are amongst the thousands of western Christians who undertook the arduous journey to the Holy Land in the decades immediately before the Reformation. More importantly, they are members of a much more select group: those who left written a...
Before Enlightenment
In Before Enlightenment: Play and Illusion in Renaissance Humanism, Timothy Kircher argues for new ways of appreciating Renaissance humanist philosophy. Literary qualities – tone, voice, persona, style, imagery – composed a core of their philosophizing, so that play and illusion, as well as rational certainty, formed pre-Enlightenment ideas about knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics. Before Enlightenment takes issue with the long-standing view of humanism’s philosophical mediocrity. It shows new features of Renaissance culture that help explain the origins not only of Enlightenment rationalists, but also of early modern novelists and essayists. If humanist writings promoted objective knowledge based on reason’s supremacy over emotion, they also showed awareness of one’s place and play in the world. The animal rationale is also the homo ludens.
Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance
In Debating the Stars, Ovanes Akopyan sheds new light on the astrological controversies that arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries after the publication of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (1496). This treatise has often been held responsible for a contemporary reassessment of the status of astrology, a discipline that attracted widespread fascination in the Renaissance. Akopyan’s reconstruction of the development of Pico’s views demonstrates that the Disputationes was a continuation of rather than a drastic rupture with the rest of his legacy. By investigating the philosophical and humanist foundations for Pico’s attack on astrological predictions, Akopyan challenges the popular assumption that the treatise was written under Girolamo Savonarola’s spell. He shows instead how it was appropriated ideologically by pro-Savonarolan circles after Pico’s death. This book also offers a comprehensive study of the immediate reception of the Disputationes across Italy and Europe and reveals that the debates initiated by Pico’s intervention pervaded all of the European intellectual oikumene.
History of Universities
This volume contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports and bibliographical information, which makes this publication useful for the historian of higher education. Its contributions range widely geographically, chronologically, and in subject-matter.
The Turn of the Soul
The religious upheavals of the early modern period and the fierce debate they unleashed about true devotion gave conversion an unprecedented urgency. With their rich variety of emotive, aesthetic and rhetoric means of expression, literature and the visual arts proved particularly well-adapted means to address, explore and represent the complex nature of conversion. At the same time, many artists and authors experimented with the notion that the expressive character of their work could cultivate a sensory experience for the viewer that enacted conversion. Indeed, focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing religious issues, this volume demonstrates that conversion cannot be separated from the creative and spiritual ways in which it was given meaning. Contributors include Mathilde Bernard, John R. Decker, Xander van Eck, Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi, Lise Gosseye, Chloë Houston, Philip Major, Walter Melion, Bart Ramakers, E. Natalie Rothman, Alison Searle, Lieke Stelling, Jayme Yeo, and Federico Zuliani.
