Historians have conventionally viewed intellectual and artistic achievement as a seamless progression in a single direction, with the Renaissance, as identified by Jacob Burckhardt, as the root and foundation of modern culture. But in this brilliant new analysis William Bouwsma rethinks the accepted view, arguing that while the Renaissance had a beginning and, unquestionably, a climax, it also had an ending. Examining the careers of some of the greatest figures of the age--Montaigne, Galileo, Jonson, Descartes, Hooker, Shakespeare, and Cervantes among many others--Bouwsma perceives in their work a growing sense of doubt and anxiety about the modern world. He considers first those features of modern European culture generally associated with the traditional Renaissance, features which reached their climax in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But even as the movements of the Renaissance gathered strength, simultaneous impulses operated in a contrary direction. Bouwsma identifies a growing concern with personal identity, shifts in the interests of major thinkers, a decline in confidence about the future, and a heightening of anxiety. Exploring the fluctuating and sometimes contradictory atmosphere in which Renaissance artists and thinkers operated, Bouwsma shows how the very liberation from old boundaries and modes of expression that characterized the Renaissance became itself increasingly stifling and destructive. By drawing attention to the waning of the Renaissance culture of freedom and creativity, Bouwsma offers a wholly new and intriguing interpretation of the place of the European Renaissance in modern culture.

Chronological surveys of national musical cultures (in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Spain), genre studies (Mass, motet, madrigal, chanson, instrumental music, opera), as well as essays on intellectual and cultural developments and concepts relevant to music (music theory, printing, the Protestant Reformation and the corresponding Catholic movement, humanism, the concepts of "Renaissance" and "Baroque").

The central thesis of this book is that skepticism was instrumental to the defense of orthodox religion and the development of the identity of the Church of England. Examining the presence of skepticism in non-fiction prose literature at four transitional moments in English Protestant history during which orthodoxy was challenged and revised, Melissa Caldwell argues that a skeptical mode of thinking is embedded in the literary and rhetorical choices made by English writers who straddle the project of reform and the maintenance of orthodoxy after the Reformation in England. Far from being a radical belief simply indicative of an emerging secularism, she demonstrates the varied and complex appropriations of skeptical thought in early modern England. By examining a selection of various kinds of literature-including religious polemic, dialogue, pamphlets, sermons, and treatises-produced at key moments in early modern England’s religious history, Caldwell shows how the writers under consideration capitalized on the unscripted moral space that emerged in the wake of the Reformation. The result was a new kind of discourse--and a new form of orthodoxy--that sought both to exploit and to contain the skepticism unearthed by the Reformation.

This volume fills an important gap in the analysis of early modern history and culture by reintroducing scholars to the significance of the horse. A more complete understanding of the role of horses and horsemanship is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the early modern world. Each essay in the collection provides a snapshot of how horse culture and the broader culture - that tapestry of images, objects, structures, sounds, gestures, texts, and ideas - articulate. Without knowledge of how the horse figured in all these aspects, no version of political, material, or intellectual culture in the period can be entirely accurate.

This study examines the thought of Guillaume Postel (1510-1581), a French religious thinker who relied on Jewish Kabbalah and its mystical understanding of gender to argue that a female messiah had arrived who would heal the political and religious conflicts of sixteenth-century Europe.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

This is an integrated study of the revival of philosophical studies in 16th-century central-European Jewry focusing on seven major thinkers and especially on the intellectual development of Ephraim Luntshitz (1550-1619). Preoccupation with philosophy is traced through Moses Isserles, Solomon Luria, Mordecai Jaffe, Abraham Horowitz, Eliezer Ashkenazi, Maharal of Prague, and Ephraim Luntshitz. Analysis of these thinkers’ intellectual affiliations is based on close analysis of their primary texts, of which a generous selection is provided in translation for the first time. This work advances the scholarly study of 16th-century Polish-Jewish culture, the Polish Jewish Renaissance, the philosophical interests of Ashkenazic Jewry, Jewish responses to Renaissance humanism and the Reformation, and the early-modern background for the 18th-century Jewish Enlightenment.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume, and third to appear in the series, covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded. Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction. Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.