Explores vital documents from important world figures from the 15th and 16th centuries, including Thomas Aquinas, Giovanni Boccaccio, Marco Polo, and many more.
Shows how poetry and politics are entangled in the development of the Reformation concept of religious fanaticism.Proposes a new relationship between poetic form and history.
We may think we know ...what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term fanatic, from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable one. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, turning to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasants' Revolt to the English Civil War.
The book traces two entangled approaches to fanaticism in this long Reformation moment: the targeting of it as an extreme political threat and the engagement with it as a deep epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke positioned themselves against fanaticism to pathologize rebellion and abet theological and political control. In the second, which arose alongside and often in response to the first, the poets of fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical self-annihilation-the process by which one could become a vessel for divine violence-and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic's claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to know and depict the origins of fanaticism. Yet this crisis of unknowing was a productive one. It led these writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanaticism's tendency to unsettle the boundaries between human and divine agency and between individual and collective bodies. These poets demand a new critical method, which this book attempts to model: a historically-minded and politicized formalism that can attend to the complexity of the poetic encounter with fanaticism. While a study of the seventeenth century, the book opens up broader cultural and theoretical questions relating to religion and the secular, to selfhood, and to political theology.
Raphael’s Ostrich begins with a little-studied aspect of Raphael’s painting—the ostrich, which appears as an attribute of Justice, painted in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. ...Una Roman D’Elia traces the cultural and artistic history of the ostrich from its appearances in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the menageries and grotesque ornaments of sixteenth-century Italy. Following the complex history of shifting interpretations given to the ostrich in scientific, literary, religious, poetic, and satirical texts and images, D’Elia demonstrates the rich variety of ways in which people made sense of this living “monster,” which was depicted as the embodiment of heresy, stupidity, perseverance, justice, fortune, gluttony, and other virtues and vices. Because Raphael was revered as a god of art, artists imitated and competed with his ostrich, while religious and cultural critics complained about the potential for misinterpreting such obscure imagery. This book not only considers the history of the ostrich but also explores how Raphael’s painting forced viewers to question how meaning is attributed to the natural world, a debate of central importance in early modern Europe at a time when the disciplines of modern art history and natural history were developing. The strangeness of Raphael’s ostrich, situated at the crossroads of art, religion, myth, and natural history, both reveals lesser-known sides of Raphael’s painting and illuminates major cultural shifts in attitudes toward nature and images in the Renaissance. More than simply an examination of a single artist or a single subject, Raphael’s Ostrich offers an accessible, erudite, and charming alternative to Vasari’s pervasive model of the history of sixteenth-century Italian art.
The concepts of purity and contamination preoccupied early modern Europeans fundamentally, structuring virtually every aspect of their lives, not least how they created and experienced works of art ...and the built environment. In an era that saw a great number of objects and people in motion, the meteoric rise of new artistic and building technologies, and religious upheaval exert new pressures on art and its institutions, anxieties about the pure and the contaminated - distinctions between the clean and unclean, sameness and difference, self and other, organization and its absence - took on heightened importance. In this series of geographically and methodologically wide-ranging essays, thirteen leading historians of art and architecture grapple with the complex ways that early modern actors negotiated these concerns, covering topics as diverse as Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures, Venetian plague hospitals, Spanish-Muslim tapestries, and emergency currency. The resulting volume offers surprising new insights into the period and into the modern disciplinary routines of art and architectural history.
This book considers a range of antiquarian practices – history-writing, archaeological investigations, works of art, architecture and literature – that emerged in early modern Europe. Challenging the ...idea of a single 'Renaissance', it assembles essays on local antiquities in Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.This collection investigates the wide array of local antiquarian practices that developed across Europe in the early modern era. Breaking new ground, it explores local concepts of antiquity in a period that has been defined as a uniform 'Renaissance'. Contributors take a novel approach to the revival of the antique in different parts of Italy, as well as examining other, less widely studied antiquarian traditions in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Poland. They consider how real or fictive ruins, inscriptions and literary works were used to demonstrate a particular idea of local origins, to rewrite history or to vaunt civic pride. In doing so, they tackle such varied subjects as municipal antiquities collections in Southern Italy and France, the antiquarian response to the pagan, Christian and Islamic past on the Iberian Peninsula, and Netherlandish interest in megalithic ruins thought to be traces of a prehistoric race of Giants.
Urbino, Rome, Florence, Milan, Ferrara... but also Mantua and Imola, Carpi and Saluzzo, Naples and Sicily: a collection of case studies on the Renaissance renewal of Italian court palaces from a ...comparative perspective.
This book focuses on the interplay between the discovery of new lands and the rediscovery of old texts, describing the parallel emergence of colonialism and its critique.
The Renaissance Faire - a 50 year-long party, communal ritual, political challenge and cultural wellspring - receives its first sustained historical attention with Well Met. Beginning with the ...chaotic communal moment of its founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a major family friendlyleisure site in the 2000s, Well Met tells the story of the thinkers, artists, clowns, mimes, and others performers who make the Faire.Well Met approaches the Faire from the perspective of labor, education, aesthetics, business, the opposition it faced, and the key figures involved. Drawing upon vibrant interview material and deep archival research, Rachel Lee Rubin reveals the way the faires established themselves as a pioneering and highly visible counter cultural referendum on how we live now - our family and sexual arrangements, our relationship to consumer goods, and our corporate entertainments.In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants,both workers and visitors, Rubin has compiled a dazzling array of testimony, from extensive conversations with Faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and playtrons. Well Met pays equal attention what came out of the faire - the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire's innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960sand 1970s, experimentation with ethnic musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire. Original, intrepid, and richly illustrated, Well Met puts the Renaissance Faire back at the historical center of the American counterculture.
What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive
emotions in early modern literature and culture includes
essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in
the ...Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth,
solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and
interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions,
affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to
reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern
period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights
culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between
what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive
introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into
the histories of good feeling and their significances for
understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing.
