European history: Renaissance Books

The Peace of Utrecht (1713) was perhaps the first political treaty that had a global impact. It not only ended a European-wide conflict, but also led to a cessation of hostilities on the American continent and Indian subcontinent, as well as naval...

First published in 1983, John Miller's Glorious Revolution established itself as the standard introduction to the subject. It examines the dramatic events themselves and demonstrates the profound impact the Revolution had on subsequent British history...

The Age of Discovery explores one of the most dramatic features of the late medieval and early modern period: when voyagers from Western Europe led by Spain and Portugal set out across the world and established links with Africa, Asia and the Americas...

Leo Teohari was born in Constanta, Romania. Leo holds both a law degree and a degree in international economics.Leo defected from Communist Romania in 1980, and settled with his family in Toronto, Canada, where he became a businessman. Today he writes...

Originally published in 1968 this collection of essays is authored by scholars from the UK, Europe and the U. S. A. and covers Renaissance art, prose and poetry including discussions on the work of Montaigne, Rabelais, Flaubert and Baudelaire.

Post-mortems may have become a staple of our TV viewing, but the long history of this practice is still little known. This book provides a fresh account of the dissections that took place across early modern Europe on those who had died of a disease or...

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from...

Student's edition of Letarouilly's five-volume work brings Renaissance Rome's architectural splendors within the grasp of students and other readers. Includes plans, elevations, and details of buildings and monuments designed by Michelangelo, Peruzzi,...

This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The...

An interdisciplinary exploration of white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s.

This book retraces the life and experience of Princess Louisa Ulrika of Prussia (1720-1782), who became queen of Sweden, with a particular emphasis on her political role and activities. As crown princess (1744-1751), queen (1751-1771) and then queen...

Established in 1542, the Roman Inquisition operated through a network of almost fifty tribunals to combat heretical and heterodox threats within the papal territories. Whilst its theological, institutional and political aspects have been well-studied,...

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its...

First published in 1928.'Something more than an historical document of the first importance...his narrative is so readable that one's interest and admiration are equally divided between the stupendous events he records and the charming revelations of his...

Giordano Bruno's visit to Elizabethan England in the 1580s left its imprint on many fields of contemporary culture, ranging from the newly-developing science, the philosophy of knowledge and language, to the extraordinary flowering of Elizabethan poetry...

This is the definitive study of John Dee and his intellectual career. Originally published in 1988, this interpretation is far more detailed than any that came before and is an authoritative account for anyone interested in the history, literature and...

Although Charlemagne held a strong position in defining France's national identity for more than ten centuries, he was swiftly rejected as a national hero from the 1870s onwards for being too German and has never really regained his rightful place in...

A Boccaccian Renaissance brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars in diverse national traditions to respond to the largely unaddressed question of Boccaccio's impact on early modern literature and culture in Italy and Europe...

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" - the active creation of new...

Maria of Austria was one of the longest surviving Renaissance Empresses but until now has received little attention by biographers. This book explores her life, actions, and management of domestic affairs, which became a feared example of how an Empress...

This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away...

At what point did machines and technology begin to have an impact on the cultural consciousness and imagination of Europe? How was this reflected through the art and literature of the time? Was technology a sign of the fall of humanity from its original...

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern...

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the...

The Arte dei rigattieri (merchants of second-hand goods in Florence) has never been ​​the subject of a systematic study, even in scholarship devoted to the history of trades. Underpinned by a large collection of archival material, this book analyzes the...

Visualizing Venice presents the ways in which the use of innovative technology can provide new and fascinating stories about places and times within history. Written by those behind the Visualizing Venice project, this book explores the variety of...

The Critics of Edmund Spenser is a book written by Herbert Ellsworth Cory, first published in 1911. The book is a critical analysis of the works of Edmund Spenser, one of the most celebrated poets of the Elizabethan era. The author examines the reception...

The defeat of the Spanish Armada did not put an end to Spanish sea power, nor to Spain's ambitions in northern Europe. By the mid-1590s, Spain had recovered from the disaster of 1588, and the renewed naval wars together with the outbreak of rebellion in...

Recontextualizes late medieval famines using contemporary concepts of complex human disasters, vulnerability, and resilience.

In The Confucian-Legalist State, Dingxin Zhao offers a radically new analysis of Chinese imperial history from the eleventh century BCE to the fall of the Qing dynasty. This study first uncovers the factors that explain how, and why, China developed into...

The novelists of the Harlem Renaissance began writing at a point in America's literary history when the romantic tradition was being set aside for the gutsy truth-telling of realist literature. Modern criticism seems to take the flowery, nineteenth...

First published in 1962, Frank Smith Fussner's introduction to the revolution in English historical writing and thought during the period of the renaissance and reformation (1580-1640) is an influential and thoroughly-researched work. It offers an...

Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours.Exploring the nature and...

Argument was the basis of Renaissance education; both rhetoric and dialectic permeated early modern humanist culture, including drama. This study approaches Shakespeare's history plays by analyzing the use of argument in the plays and examining the...

Travel in early modern Europe is frequently represented as synonymous with the institution of the Grand Tour, a journey undertaken by elite young males from northern Europe to the centres of the arts and antiquity in Italy. Taking a somewhat different...

Originally published in 1978 this book assesses the Medici achievements as they appear to the 21st Century reader. As well as discussing individuals from the Medici clan, Medicean politics, bloodshed and conspiracies are also examined and relations with...

When this book was first published in 1927 there was a dearth of material written in English about the leading women of Florence at the time of the Renaissance. This volume, based primarily on their own letters, filled that gap. As well as discussing the...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as...

Now in its fifth edition, The Italian City Republics illustrates how, from the eleventh century onwards, many Italian towns achieved independence as political entities, unhindered by any centralising power. Until the fourteenth century, when the regimes...

This scholarly and conscientious book makes an important . . . contribution to the study and interpretation of Buffon, and so, too, to the Enlightenment generally. What Lyon and Sloan have done is present English texts under four headings, so that we...

This book brings together key, incisive writings (published and unpublished) of the late Andre Gunder Frank on world development and world history in a singular volume. The selections provide the reader with a historical tracing of Gunder Frank's...