The book offers studies on different aspects of the life, activity, and written works of Roberto da Lecce, one of the most famous preachers of fifteenth-century Italy. His preaching cycles in Italian cities were attended by huge crowds and are representative for the activity of many other less-known confreres and, in the meantime, exceptional for their number and success. His sermons were read and re-used throughout Europe, contributing to shaping the shared religious culture. The nine authors of this book have addressed this polyhedric figure from ten different perspectives. Contributors are Yoko Kimura, Salvatore Leaci, Andrea Radošević, Cecilia Rado, Carolyn Muessig, Giacomo Mariani, Marco Maggiore, Lyn Blanchfield, and Steven J McMichael.

The book offers a renewed study of the life and works of one of the most famous popular preachers and sermon authors of Renaissance Italy, providing a reference work on the figure of Roberto Caracciolo and a reading of his times.

"In the second half of the fifteenth century, Roberto Caracciolo's preaching touched the most important cities of Italy, and met with wide and resounding success. His sermons were read and diffused throughout Italy and Europe, propelled by the emergence of the printing press industry. This book provides a new and comprehensive study of his life, preaching and writing, replacing outdated resources and adding new and hitherto unknown data. It offers a reference work on a relevant social, intellectual and religious actor of Renaissance Italy and a reading of those times through the life and works of a celebrated preacher"--

This study is the first to examine the relationship between art and violence in 15th-century Florence, exposing the underbelly of a period more often celebrated for enlightened and progressive ideas. Renaissance Florentines were constantly subjected to the sight of violence, whether in carefully staged rituals of execution or images of the suffering inflicted on Christ. There was nothing new in this culture of pain, unlike the aesthetic of violence that developed towards the end of the 15th century. It emerged in the work of artists such as Piero di Cosimo, Bertoldo di Giovanni, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and the young Michelangelo. Inspired by the art of antiquity, they painted, engraved, and sculpted images of deadly battles, ultimately normalizing representations of brutal violence. Drawing on work in social and literary history, as well as art history, Scott Nethersole sheds light on the relationship between these Renaissance images, violence, and ideas of artistic invention and authorship.

"This multidisciplinary project studies religious murals that were painted by Christianized Maya artists in the first centuries after the conquest of Mexico. Solari and Williams study the paintings, all of which are based in the Yucatán Peninsula, from an art history perspective, along with the printed sources referencing the murals. At the same time, they examine the chemical signatures left by the murals' pigments and the techniques used in their production through state-of-the-art imaging technologies. By using these methodologies, the authors seek to explain the many ways in which cultural and material exchange took place between the Spanish and Maya peoples. At first glance, murals depicting Spanish ideals of Western Christianity would appear to be an obvious and frequent tool of oppression in the Yucatán, as they were elsewhere in the Americas, but they were also a form of agency for Indigenous people as a means to shape these narratives with their own subtle imagery and ideas drawn from Mayan cosmologies and cultural traditions. These painters used European pictorial techniques, such as perspective, while also using local materials to create vivid pigments and colors never before seen in murals in Europe. The authors seek to trace how the initial and continued use of these material sources to create these images led to a much more localized form of Catholicism that continues to be practiced by Mayan speakers today"--

Francis of Assisi, whose Gospel performance captured the imagination of his day, fostered a movement which was fascinated by the transformative power of the embodied Word. This book offers an extensive English language study of medieval Franciscan preaching.

This book explores the relationships between ancient witchcraft and its modern incarnation, and by doing so fills an important gap in the historiography. It is often noted that stories of witchcraft circulated in Greek and Latin classical texts, and that treatises dealing with witch-beliefs referenced them. Still, the role of humanistic culture and classical revival in the developing of the witch-hunts has not yet been fully researched. Marina Montesano examines Greek and Latin literature, revealing how particular features of ancient striges were carried into the Late Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and into the fifteenth century, when early Italian trials recall the myth of the strix common in ancient Latin sources and in popular memory. The final chapter also serves as a conclusion, to show how in Renaissance Italy and beyond, classical accounts of witchcraft ceased to be just stories, as they had formerly been, and were instead used to attest to the reality of witches’ powers.

Pioneering art historian Jacob Burckhardt saw the Italian Renaissance as no less than the beginning of the modern world. In this hugely influential work he argues that the Renaissance's creativity, competitiveness, dynasties, great city-states and even its vicious rulers sowed the seeds of a new era. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Located in the heel of the Italian boot, the Salento region was home to a diverse population between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Inhabitants spoke Latin, Greek, and various vernaculars, and their houses of worship served sizable congregations of Jews as well as Roman-rite and Orthodox Christians. Yet the Salentines of this period laid claim to a definable local identity that transcended linguistic and religious boundaries. The evidence of their collective culture is embedded in the traces they left behind: wall paintings and inscriptions, graffiti, carved ­­tombstone decorations, belt fittings from graves, and other artifacts reveal a wide range of religious, civic, and domestic practices that helped inhabitants construct and maintain personal, group, and regional identities. The Medieval Salento allows the reader to explore the visual and material culture of a people using a database of over three hundred texts and images, indexed by site. Linda Safran draws from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory to reconstruct medieval Salentine customs of naming, language, appearance, and status. She pays particular attention to Jewish and nonelite residents, whose lives in southern Italy have historically received little scholarly attention. This extraordinarily detailed visual analysis reveals how ethnic and religious identities can remain distinct even as they mingle to become a regional culture.