A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY52 start with M start with M
“Machiavellian”—used to describe the ruthless cunning of the power-obsessed and the pitiless—is never meant as a compliment. But the man whose name became shorthand for all that is ugly in politics was more engaging and nuanced than his reputation suggests. Christopher S. Celenza’s Machiavelli: A Portrait removes the varnish of centuries to reveal not only the hardnosed political philosopher but the skilled diplomat, learned commentator on ancient history, comic playwright, tireless letter writer, and thwarted lover.
Machiavelli’s hometown was the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century, a place of unparalleled artistic and intellectual attainments. But Florence was also riven by extraordinary violence. War and public executions were commonplace—Machiavelli himself was imprisoned and brutally tortured at the behest of his own government. These experiences left a deep impression on this keen observer of power politics, whose two masterpieces—The Prince and The Discourses—draw everywhere on the hard-won wisdom gained from navigating a treacherous world. But like many of Machiavelli’s fellow Florentines, he also immersed himself in the Latin language and wisdom of authors from the classical past. And for all of Machiavelli’s indifference to religion, vestiges of Christianity remained in his thought, especially the hope for a redeemer—a prince who would provide the stability so rare in Machiavelli’s worldly experience.
“Machiavellian” can signify duplicity and amorality in politics, but Machiavelli himself was far more complex than this cliché. A high-ranking Florentine government official and prolific writer of hugely influential political, military, and historical works, Machiavelli was also a vernacular poet, first-rank dramatist, and religious radical, rejecting not only the contemporary Catholic Church but Christianity itself. From champion of Florentine popular republicanism to political radical to conservative, Machiavelli explores the many facets of the man described as the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
With Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict, David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara have brought together the most recent research on The Prince, with contributions from many of the leading scholars of Machiavelli, including Quentin Skinner, Harvey Mansfield, Erica Benner, John McCormick, and Giovanni Giorgini. Organized into four sections, the book focuses first on Machiavelli’s place in the history of political thought: Is he the last of the ancients or the creator of a new, distinctly modern conception of politics? And what might the answer to this question reveal about the impact of these disparate traditions on the founding of modern political philosophy? The second section contrasts current understandings of Machiavelli’s view of virtues in The Prince. The relationship between political leaders, popular power, and liberty is another perennial problem in studies of Machiavelli, and the third section develops several claims about that relationship. Finally, the fourth section explores the legacy of Machiavelli within the republican tradition of political thought and his relevance to enduring political issues.
Starting with Machiavelli’s two major political works, Zuckert persuasively shows that the moral revolution Machiavelli sets out in The Prince lays the foundation for the new form of democratic republic he proposes in the Discourses. Distrusting ambitious politicians to serve the public interest of their own accord, Machiavelli sought to persuade them in The Prince that the best way to achieve their own ambitions was to secure the desires and ambitions of their subjects and fellow citizens. In the Discourses, he then describes the types of laws and institutions that would balance the conflict between the two in a way that would secure the liberty of most, if not all. In the second half of her book, Zuckert places selected later works—La Mandragola, The Art of War, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, Clizia, and Florentine Histories—under scrutiny, showing how Machiavelli further developed certain aspects of his thought in these works. In The Art of War, for example, he explains more concretely how and to what extent the principles of organization he advanced in The Prince and the Discourses ought to be applied in modern circumstances. Because human beings act primarily on passions, Machiavelli attempts to show readers what those passions are and how they can be guided to have productive rather than destructive results.
A stunning and ambitious analysis, Machiavelli’s Politics brilliantly shows how many conflicting perspectives do inform Machiavelli’s teachings, but that one needs to consider all of his works in order to understand how they cohere into a unified political view. This is a magisterial work that cannot be ignored if a comprehensive understanding of the philosopher is to be obtained.
Prostitute, apostle, evangelist—the conversion of Mary Magdalene from sinner to saint is one of the Christian tradition’s most compelling stories, and one of the most controversial. The identity of the woman—or, more likely, women—represented by this iconic figure has been the subject of dispute since the Church’s earliest days. Much less appreciated is the critical role the Magdalene played in remaking modern Christianity.
In a vivid recreation of the Catholic and Protestant cultures that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Magdalene in the Reformation reveals that the Magdalene inspired a devoted following among those eager to find new ways to relate to God and the Church. In popular piety, liturgy, and preaching, as well as in education and the arts, the Magdalene tradition provided both Catholics and Protestants with the flexibility to address the growing need for reform. Margaret Arnold shows that as the medieval separation between clergy and laity weakened, the Magdalene represented a new kind of discipleship for men and women and offered alternative paths for practicing a Christian life.
Where many have seen two separate religious groups with conflicting preoccupations, Arnold sees Christians who were often engaged in a common dialogue about vocation, framed by the life of Mary Magdalene. Arnold disproves the idea that Protestants removed saints from their theology and teaching under reform. Rather, devotion to Mary Magdalene laid the foundation within Protestantism for the public ministry of women.
“This book is nothing less than the definitive study of a text long considered central to understanding the Renaissance and its place in Western culture.”
—James Hankins, Harvard University
Pico della Mirandola died in 1494 at the age of thirty-one. During his brief and extraordinary life, he invented Christian Kabbalah in a book that was banned by the Catholic Church after he offered to debate his ideas on religion and philosophy with anyone who challenged him. Today he is best known for a short speech, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486 but never delivered. Sometimes called a “Manifesto of the Renaissance,” this text has been regarded as the foundation of humanism and a triumph of secular rationality over medieval mysticism.
Brian Copenhaver upends our understanding of Pico’s masterwork by re-examining this key document of modernity. An eminent historian of philosophy, Copenhaver shows that the Oration is not about human dignity. In fact, Pico never wrote an Oration on the Dignity of Man and never heard of that title. Instead he promoted ascetic mysticism, insisting that Christians need help from Jews to find the path to heaven—a journey whose final stages are magic and Kabbalah. Through a rigorous philological reading of this much-studied text, Copenhaver transforms the history of the idea of dignity and reveals how Pico came to be misunderstood over the course of five centuries. Magic and the Dignity of Man is a seismic shift in the study of one of the most remarkable thinkers of the Renaissance.
A revelatory new account of the magus—the learned magician—and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.
In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus—a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.
Magus details the arts and experiences of learned magicians including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton explores their methods, the knowledge they produced, the services they provided, and the overlapping political and social milieus to which they aspired—often, the circles of kings and princes. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these erudite men anchored debates about licit and illicit magic, the divine and the diabolical, and the nature of “good” and “bad” magicians. Over time, they turned magic into a complex art, which drew on contemporary engineering as well as classical astrology, probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos.
Resituating the magus in the social, cultural, and intellectual order of Renaissance Europe, Grafton sheds new light on both the recesses of the learned magician’s mind and the many worlds he inhabited.
Until the last century, it was generally agreed that Maimonides was a great defender of Judaism, and Spinoza—as an Enlightenment advocate for secularization—among its key opponents. However, a new scholarly consensus has recently emerged that the teachings of the two philosophers were in fact much closer than was previously thought. In his perceptive new book, Joshua Parens sets out to challenge the now predominant view of Maimonides as a protomodern forerunner to Spinoza—and to show that a chief reason to read Maimonides is in fact to gain distance from our progressively secularized worldview.
Making the Renaissance Man explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt—all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.
In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was cunningly yoked by Columbus and others to the service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to the breaking point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that the experience of the marvelous is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Léry, and Montaigne—and notably in Mandeville's Travels, the most popular travel book of the Middle Ages—wonder is a sign of a remarkably tolerant recognition of cultural difference.
Marvelous Possession is not only a collection of the odd and exotic through which Stephen Greenblatt powerfully conveys a sense of the marvelous, but also a highly original extension of his thinking on a subject that has occupied him throughout his career. The book reaches back to the ancient Greeks and forward to the present to ask how it is possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder from being poisoned?
"A marvellous book. It is also a compelling and a powerful one. Nothing so original has ever been written on European responses to 'The wonder of the New World.'"—Anthony Pagden, Times Literary Supplement
"By far the most intellectually gripping and penetrating discussion of the relationship between intruders and natives is provided by Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions."—Simon Schama, The New Republic
"For the most engaging and illuminating perspective of all, read Marvelous Possessions."—Laura Shapiro, Newsweek
A beautifully designed selection of the finest Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections, giving remarkable insight into the creative processes of some of the greatest artists in history.
This book features masterpieces of Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections in Lille, Rennes and Chantilly.
Beginning with an examination of drawing as part of the creative process, and showing how it reveals the artist's mind at work, the author explains in detail the materials and techniques used in Renaissance drawings. It also considers how drawings were used, how they changed stylistically through the period and how they varied in different regions of Italy. It concludes with a brief look at connoisseurship and collecting.
The main body of the book showcases 112 of the finest drawings by more than 40 Italian Renaissance masters, including Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, accompanied by a concise sketch of the life and work of each artist. Arranged chronologically, they reveal stylistic and geographical trends as well as personal interactions between the artists themselves, and provide an extraordinary insight in to the artistic world of Renaissance Italy.
A Mattress Maker’s Daughter richly illuminates the narrative of two people whose mutual affection shaped their own lives and in some ways their times. According to the Renaissance legend, told and retold across the centuries, a woman of questionable reputation bamboozles a middle-aged warrior-prince into marrying her, and the family takes revenge. He is don Giovanni de’ Medici, son of the Florentine grand duke; she is Livia Vernazza, daughter of a Genoese artisan. They live in luxury for a while, far from Florence, and have a child. Then, Giovanni dies, the family pounces upon the inheritance, and Livia is forced to return from riches to rags. Documents, including long-lost love letters, reveal another story behind the legend, suppressed by the family and forgotten. Brendan Dooley investigates this largely untold story, among the various settings where episodes occurred, between Florence, Genoa, Venice.
In the course of explaining their improbable liaison and its consequences, A Mattress Maker’s Daughter explores early modern emotions, material culture, heredity, absolutism, and religious tensions at the crux of one of the great transformations in European culture, society, and statecraft. Giovanni and Livia exemplify changing concepts of love and romance, new standards of public and private conduct, and emerging attitudes toward property and legitimacy just as the age of Renaissance humanism gave way to the culture of Counter Reformation and Early Modern Europe.
This book is the first comprehensive examination of medical ethics in the Renaissance. It investigates the ethical considerations, evaluations of procedures, and techniques of problem-solving in the writings of European physicians and surgeons from the mid-sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries.
While much of the medical practice and literature of the Renaissance remained a continuation or reinterpretation of ancient medicine, Winfried Schleiner reveals an emerging self-conscious field of medical ethics that should be considered modern, as it increasingly separates medicine from theology, the cure of the body from that of the soul. The exceptions to this trend appear in the discussions of certain sexual topics, such as masturbation, by physicians close to the Counter-Reformation. Analyzing the writings of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish physicians—the latter developed the most secular medical ethics of the era—he probes the dominant and emerging philosophical ideas together with conceptions of the role of physicians and of physical well-being.
Schleiner selects several topics to explore the development of ethical ideas in depth: placebos and the broader issue of lying to patients; the treatment of hysteria; masturbation; and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases—subjects that are still highly charged moral as well as medical topics today.
This pioneering study will be of value to ethicists and to historians of science, medicine, and Renaissance and gender studies.
In 1537, Florentine Duke Alessandro dei Medici was murdered by his cousin and would-be successor, Lorenzino dei Medici. Lorenzino's treachery forced him into exile, however, and the Florentine senate accepted a compromise candidate, seventeen-year-old Cosimo dei Medici. The senate hoped Cosimo would act as figurehead, leaving the senate to manage political affairs. But Cosimo never acted as a puppet. Instead, by the time of his death in 1574, he had stabilized ducal finances, secured his borders while doubling his territory, attracted an array of scholars and artists to his court, academy, and universities, and, most importantly, dissipated the perennially fractious politics of Florentine life.
Gregory Murry argues that these triumphs were far from a foregone conclusion. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and published sources, he examines how Cosimo and his propagandists successfully crafted an image of Cosimo as a legitimate sacral monarch. Murry posits that both the propaganda and practice of sacral monarchy in Cosimo's Florence channeled preexisting local religious assumptions as a way to establish continuities with the city's republican and renaissance past. In The Medicean Succession, Murry elucidates the models of sacral monarchy that Cosimo chose to utilize as he deftly balanced his ambition with the political sensitivities arising from existing religious and secular traditions.
Read by Protestants and Catholics alike, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–94) was the foremost German woman poet and writer in the seventeenth-century German-speaking world. Privileged by her social station and education, she published a large body of religious writings under her own name to a reception unequaled by any other German woman during her lifetime. But once the popularity of devotional writings as a genre waned, Catharina’s works went largely unread until scholars devoted renewed attention to them in the twentieth century.
For this volume, Lynne Tatlock translates for the first time into English three of the thirty-six meditations, restoring Catharina to her rightful place in print. These meditations foreground women in the life of Jesus Christ—including accounts of women at the Incarnation and the Tomb—and in Scripture in general. Tatlock’s selections give the modern reader a sense of the structure and nature of Catharina’s devotional writings, highlighting the alternative they offer to the male-centered view of early modern literary and cultural production during her day, and redefining the role of women in Christian history.
In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England.
Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.
For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures elucidates many of Michelangelo’s paintings, from frescoes in the Sistine Chapel to the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, the artist’s lesser-known works in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel; also included is a study of the relationship of the Doni Madonna to Leonardo.
Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking. Almost everything he wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but always put into the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo’s rendering of figures, as well as their gestures and interrelations, conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers.
Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. Michelangelo’s Painting is the second volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.
For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo’s work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist’s highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures explicates many of Michelangelo’s most celebrated sculptures, applying principles gleaned from long, hard looking. Almost everything Steinberg wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but here put to the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo’s rendering of figures as well as their gestures and interrelations conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body and its actions to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers—or, as Steinberg put it, in Michelangelo’s art, “anatomy becomes theology.”
Michelangelo’s Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of Steinberg’s selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a book review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master’s work, a light-hearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession and, finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.
A new history of how one of the Renaissance’s preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars.
In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the “key to Italy,” found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion.
John Gagné offers a new history of Milan’s demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost.
Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.
Bristling with insights on Milton’s major works, Milton’s Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the volume's core is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton’s dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond.
Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism—assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton’s Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.
This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562.
In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.
In a striking departure from previous scholarship, Scott Lucas shows that modern critics have misconstrued the purpose of the tragic verse narratives of the Mirror, approaching them primarily as uncontroversial meditations on abstract political and philosophical doctrines. Lucas revises this view, revealing many of the Mirror tragedies to be works topically applicable in form and politically contentious in nature.
Lucas returns the earliest poems of A Mirror for Magistrates to the troubled context of their production, the tumultuous reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553–1558). As Protestants suffering from the traumatic collapse of King Edward VI's "godly" rule (1547–1553) and from the current policies of Mary's government, the Mirror authors radically reshaped their poems' historical sources in order to craft emotionally moving narratives designed to provide models for interpreting the political failures of Edward VI's reign and to offer urgent warnings to Marian magistrates.
Lucas's study also reveals how, in later poems, the Mirror authors issued oblique appeals to Queen Elizabeth's officers, boldly demanding that they allow the realm of "the literary" to stand as an unfettered discursive arena of public controversy. Lucas thus provides a provocative new approach to this seminal but long-misunderstood collection, one that restores the Mirror to its rightful place as one of the greatest works of sixteenth-century English political literature.
The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series: Volume 62
An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year
Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance and the leading literary figure of Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “il Magnifico.” The poet’s Miscellanies, including a “first century” published in 1489 and a “second century” unfinished at his death, constitute the most innovative contribution to classical philology of the Renaissance. Each chapter is a mini-essay on some lexical or textual problem which Poliziano, drawing on the riches of the Medici Library and Lorenzo’s collection of antiquities, solves with his characteristic mixture of deep learning, analytic skill, and brash criticism of his predecessors. Volume 1 presents a new Latin edition of The First Century of the Miscellanies, and these volumes together present the first translation of both collections into any modern language.
An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year
Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance and the leading literary figure of Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “il Magnifico.” The poet’s Miscellanies, including a “first century” published in 1489 and a “second century” unfinished at his death, constitute the most innovative contribution to classical philology of the Renaissance. Each chapter is a mini-essay on some lexical or textual problem which Poliziano, drawing on the riches of the Medici Library and Lorenzo’s collection of antiquities, solves with his characteristic mixture of deep learning, analytic skill, and brash criticism of his predecessors. Volume 1 presents a new Latin edition of The First Century of the Miscellanies, and these volumes together present the first translation of both collections into any modern language.
Born in Ferrara, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552) received an excellent classical education at the world-famous humanist schools of his native city. On his various travels in search of a patron, he visited Naples, frequenting the Academy there; Mirandola, where he entered the service of Gianfrancesco Pico; Milan, where he studied Greek under Demetrius Chalcondyles; and Rome, where he enjoyed the munificence of Pope Leo X. Following the sack of Rome in 1527, Giraldi eventually made his way back to Ferrara, where he spent the last years of his life.
Giraldi was the author of many works on literary history, mythology, and antiquities. Among the most famous are his dialogues, translated here into English for the first time. Modeled on Cicero’s Brutus, the work discusses hundreds of contemporary neo-Latin and vernacular poets, giving a panoramic view of European poetry in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century from Great Britain to Greece, but concentrating above all on Italy.
The Modernist Nation examines why America's modern literary movements have come to be characterized as "generations" and "renaissances," such as the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation or the Harlem, Southern, and San Francisco Renaissances. The metaphor of rebirth, Michael Soto argues, offered and continues to offer American writers a kind of shorthand for imagining American cultural history, especially as a departure from Old World (English) trappings.
Soto highlights the interracial dynamics of American literary movements, touching on authors as varied as James Weldon Johnson, Malcolm Cowley, W. E. B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jack Kerouac. After assessing the origins of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance, Soto traces the rise of the "bohemian artist" narrative, and demonstrates how a polyethnic cast of writers and critics constructed American literary production in terms of symbolic rebirth.
With the rise of projects to create global histories and art histories, the Mongol Empire is now widely taken as a fundamental watershed. In the later thirteenth century, the Mongol states reconfigured the basic zones of Eurasian trade and contact. For those they conquered, and for those who later overthrew them, new histories and narratives were needed to account for the Mongol rise. And as people, ideas, and commodities circulated in these vast and interconnected spaces, new types of objects and new visual languages were created, shifting older patterns of artistic production. The Mongol rise is now routinely cast as the first glimmering of an early modernity, defined as an ever-increasing acceleration in systems of contact, exchange, and cultural collision.
Yet what is at stake in framing the so-called Pax Mongolica in this way? What was changed by the Mongol rise, and what were its lasting legacies? It is the goal of essays in this book to address these and other questions about the Mongol impact and their modern role, and to make these debates more widely available. Contributors include specialists of Mongol history and historiography as well as Islamic, East Asian, and European art, writing on topics from historical chronicles to contemporary historiography, and case studies from textile production to mapmaking and historical linguistics.
The book analyzes the cultural valences of early modern disability across a broad national and chronological span, attending to the specific bodily, spatial, and aesthetic systems that contributed to early modern literary representations of disability. The cross section of texts (including conduct books and treatises, travel writing and wonder books) is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary exchange. Bearden questions grand narratives that convey a progression of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen, suggesting that, instead, these categories coexist and intersect.
"Professor Lowinsky's method is the only kind of 'writing about music' that I value."—Igor Stravinsky
Picking up at the end of his earlier classic study, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500— which described the courageous efforts of the followers of Islam to preserve their secular, as well as sacred, culture in late medieval Spain—L. P. Harvey chronicles here the struggles of the Moriscos. These forced converts to Christianity lived clandestinely in the sixteenth century as Muslims, communicating in aljamiado— Spanish written in Arabic characters. More broadly, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, tells the story of an early modern nation struggling to deal with diversity and multiculturalism while torn by the fanaticism of the Counter-Reformation on one side and the threat of Ottoman expansion on the other. Harvey recounts how a century of tolerance degenerated into a vicious cycle of repression and rebellion until the final expulsion in 1614 of all Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula.
Retold in all its complexity and poignancy, this tale of religious intolerance, political maneuvering, and ethnic cleansing resonates with many modern concerns. Eagerly awaited by Islamist and Hispanist scholars since Harvey's first volume appeared in 1990, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, will be compulsory reading for student and specialist alike.
In The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps, historian of cartography Benjamin B. Olshin offers the first credible book-length analysis of these artifacts, charting their course from obscure origins in the private collection of Italian-American immigrant Marcian Rossi in the 1930s; to investigations of their authenticity by the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI; to the work of the late cartographic scholar Leo Bagrow; to Olshin’s own efforts to track down and study the Rossi maps, all but one of which are in the possession of Rossi’s great-grandson Jeffrey Pendergraft. Are the maps forgeries, facsimiles, or modernized copies? Did Marco Polo’s daughters—whose names appear on several of the artifacts—preserve in them geographic information about Asia first recorded by their father? Or did they inherit maps created by him? Did Marco Polo entrust the maps to Admiral Ruggero Sanseverino, who has links to Rossi’s family line? Or, if the maps have no connection to Marco Polo, who made them, when, and why?
Regardless of the maps’ provenance, Olshin’s tale—stretching from the remote reaches of the northern Pacific to early Chinese legends—takes readers on a journey confounding yet fascinating, offering insights into Italian history, the age of exploration, and the wonders of cartography.
Though the second volume remained in fragments at the time of his death, Michel de Certeau had the foresight to leave his literary executor detailed instructions for its completion, which formed the basis for the present work. Together, both volumes solidify Certeau’s place as a touchstone of twentieth-century literature and philosophy, and continue his exploration of the paradoxes of historiography; the construction of social reality through practice, testimony, and belief; the theorization of speech in angelology and glossolalia; and the interplay of prose and poetry in discourses of the ineffable. This book will be of vital interest to scholars in religious studies, theology, philosophy, history, and literature.
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