Russianpainter Olga Suvorova is internationally known for her brilliantreinterpretations of English Pre-Rafaelite art, described by criticViktoriya Syslova as "amazingly modern in their exquisitetheatricality." Both exuberant and philosophical in mood, her richlydetailed worlds depict people who are somehow familiar to us, even intheir extravagant costumes.In this first-person account, accompanied by over 150 images of hercolorful paintings, Suvorova describes her background, earlyinfluences, and career spanning from the 1970s to today. Mysteriouscats, faithful dogs, ravishing birds, and beautiful flowers playsupporting roles in her paintings. Arevel of life, light, and energy, Suvorova's regal, Renaissance-styleart is universally loved because it offers a fresh take on a genre thatstill has wide popular appeal.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Four new titles in the series of comprehensive critical overviews of major literary movements in Western literary history The Renaissance was a turning point in the development of civilization. The great flowering of art, architecture, politics, and especially the study of literature began in Italy the late 14th century and spread throughout Europe and the Western world.

This book offers a new view of Italian Renaissance intellectual life, linking philosophy and literature as expressed in both Latin and Italian.

In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes. Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.

Concepts of heaven and hell are among the oldest, most widespread religious beliefs in history. In Western literature, they are frequently embedded in stories of underworld explorations and celestial journeys--stories examining the nature of the universe, life on earth and the existence of the gods. The author analyzes tales of wonder in both ancient and medieval European literature. Other-worldly narratives appeared in literary contexts in the ancient world, including mythology, poetry and philosophical writings. In medieval times, they remained a popular form of literary expression. These stories are primarily religious in nature, describing fantastic worlds filled with miracles and supernatural beings.

The previous Variorum collection of studies by the late F. Edward Cranz focused specifically on Nicholas of Cusa. The present selection has an equally clear focus, but a far broader scope: it brings together materials on his major thesis, of a fundamental reorientation of the categories of thought in the Latin West, c. 1100 AD, a thesis that dominated his work from the 1960s onwards. The volume differs from the usual Variorum collection in that much of the material is hitherto unpublished, distributed only in 'samizdat' form to Cranz's friends and colleagues. Nancy Struever has collated and edited the versions of these papers, and supplied the necessary annotation for his references. It includes, too, some of the research related to his editions of the Late Antique Aristotelian commentator, Alexander Aphrodisiensis, and his early research on the reception of Classical and early Christian political thought, demonstrating the pertinence of this to the reorientation thesis. Cranz's argument, centering on Anselm's reading of Augustine, and Abelard's of Boethius, but dealing with Renaissance and Reformation figures such as Petrarch and Valla, Cusanus and Luther, Nifo and Zabarella, claims a reorientation in speculative genres of the most basic premises of the relations of mind, language, and reality. Cranz's meticulous close readings of the texts make the case that the reorientation was so deep and thorough as to problematise our modern readings of Hellenic thinkers such as Aristotle, and so radical as to be 'almost invisible' to the Medieval and post-Medieval thinkers. The definitions and distinctions of thematics in this collection are of intrinsic interest, then, to Classical and Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern intellectual historians. Indeed, Cranz's work vindicates serious intellectual historical inquiry as indispensable to our understanding of the basic motives and accomplishments of the culture of Pre-Modernity.

This volume is an attempt to discuss the ways in which themes of authority and gender can be traced in the writing of chronicles and chronicle-like writings from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. With major contributions by fourteen authors, each of them specialists in the field, this study spans full across the compass of medieval and early modern Europe, from England and Scandinavia, to Byzantium and the Crusader Kingdoms; embraces a variety of media and methods; and touches evidence from diverse branches of learning such as language and literature, history and art, to name just a few. This is an important collection which will be of the highest utility for students and scholars of language, literature, and history for many years to come.

Displays the theology and spirituality of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the three major western religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance recounts the almost untold story of how the rediscovery of the pagan, mythological imagination during the Renaissance brought a profound transformation to European culture. This highly illustrated book, available for the first time in paperback, shows that the pagan imagination existed side-by-side -- often uneasily -- with the official symbols, doctrines, and art of the Church. Godwin carefully documents how pagan themes and gods enhanced both public and private life. Palaces and villas were decorated with mythological images/ stories, music, and dramatic pageants were written about pagan themes/ and landscapes were designed to transform the soul. This was a time of great social and cultural change, when the pagan idea represented nostalgia for a classical world untroubled by the idea of sin and in no need of redemption.A stunning book with hundreds of photos that bring alive this period with all its rich conflict between Christianity and classicism.