A Cultural History of Ideas in the Renaissance
Description:... "The Renaissance is famous as a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing associated with the rebirth of antiquity. It is now recognized, however, that there was considerable continuity with the preceding medieval centuries . While much that was new about the Renaissance derived from the recovery, restoration, and revival of ancient ideas an culture, the process of renewal took place against the backdrop of intellectual and cultural structures inherited from the Middle Ages. This volume of A Cultural History of Ideas explores the ways in which distinctively Renaissance ideas and a distinctly Renaissance culture emerged from the complex interaction of ancient and medieval influences. The emphasis is on the interplay between culture and ideas, observed at close quarters through studies of scholars, physicians, botanists, and scientists; popes, cardinals, and bishops; Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and heretics; missionaries and Mughal administrators; artists, craftsmen, merchants, and butchers. Contributors to the volume look not only at philosophical, scientific, medical, pharmacological, astronomical, astrological, and cosmological treatises, but also at gardens, botanical collections and drawings, woodcuts, broadsides, frontispieces, peace treaties, and commercial contracts. Tracts on optics, meteorology, monsters, military tactics, poetics, perspective, and interest rates are investigated alongside family trees, scientific illustrations, the high art of master painters and the applied art of ceramics, as well as the technologies of mining, engineering, and printing. Novels, plays, poems, mythographies, emblem books, grammars, dictionaries, popular devotional works, learned theological discourses, political and ecclesiastical histories are placed in the context of courts, town halls, libraries, academies, universities, republics, monarchies, dukedoms, and utopias."--Publisher
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