This is a new release of the original 1940 edition.

In his Book of Marvels and Travels, Sir John Mandeville describes a journey from Europe to Jerusalem and on into Asia, and the many wonderful and monstrous peoples and practices in the East. A captivating blend of fact and fantasy, Mandeville's Book is newly translated in an edition that brings us closer to Mandeville's worldview.

Not only was it mined by later writers on wonders as well as by writers of books on ghosts and demonology, but it also inspired Goethe's well-known vampire ballad, The Bride of Corinth, a translation of which is included in this book.

The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s.

A New Map of Wonders charts a course through the realm of the fascinating and awe-inspiring. With the curiosity and enthusiasm of a great explorer, the award-winning Caspar Henderson celebrates and explains the wonder of light and the origins of the universe, the myriad marvels of the human body and the natural world -- and reveals the wonders to come: the technologies that will transform human experience and change what we will find wonderful. Drawing on philosophy and natural history, art and religion, neuroscience and nanotechnology, A New Map of Wonders is a celebration of life -- a rich and inspiring guide, encouraging us to see the world anew.

""The marvelous follows us always" - or so the Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi asserted in 1587. The essays in this book collectively make the case that this assertion could be an epigraph for the Renaissance. For Wonder was a concept absolutely central to the early modern period. Encompassing both inquiry and astonishment, "wonder" indeed followed the Renaissance everywhere - into redefinitions of the mind, the body, art, literature, the known world. Often called the age of discovery, the Renaissance should also be seen as the age of the marvelous." "However, defining just what la maraviglia would have meant for Patrizi and his age is no small task." "This volume, then, seeks to explore early modern views of wonder and the marvelous by revealing the complexity of la maraviglia in the Renaissance."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Collects New Thunderbolts #7-12. Flushed with success, the Big Apple's newest heroes have to face their greatest challenge yet: an adoring public and the reflections in their mirrors! An old friend asks Speed Demon to pull off a huge heist -- will he do it? And does Blizzard want to stop him -- or get in on the action? Meanwhile, Photon tries very, very hard to remember why he should be mad at Atlas. Radioactive Man gets -- a publicist? And a resignation threatens to tear the team apart before it's even come together! Plus: Everyone in Atlantis is dying and only one man can save them -- the person responsible for their poisoning! Which T-Bolt was willing to kill thousands of people -- and is unwilling to stop the carnage? Also, Photon vs. Photon in a battle you won't believe! And...what's up with Songbird's new boyfriend...he looks a little...purple..

Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.