Netherlandish Books offers a unique overview of what was printed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Low Countries. This bibliography lists descriptions of over 32,000 editions together with bibliographical references, an introduction and indexes. It draws on the analysis of collections situated in libraries throughout the world. This is the first time that all the books published in the various territories that formed the Low Countries are presented together in a single bibliography. Netherlandish Books is an invaluable research tool for all students and scholars interested in the history, culture and literature of the Low Countries, as well as historians of the early modern book world. Customers interested in this title may also be interested in French Vernacular Books, edited by Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby and Alexander Wilkinson.

The sixteenth century was an exciting period in the history of European theatre. In the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, France, Germany and England, writers and actors experimented with new dramatic techniques and found new publics. They prepared the way for the better-known dramatists of the next century but produced much work which is valuable in its own right, in Latin and in their own vernaculars. The popular theatre of the Middle Ages gave endless material for reinvention by playwrights, and the legacy of the ancient world became a spur to creativity, in tragedy and comedy. As soon as readers and audiences had taken in the new plays, they were changed again, taking new forms as the first experiments were themselves modified and reinvented. Writers constantly adapted the texts of plays to meet new requirements. These and other issues are explored by a group of international experts from a comparative perspective, giving particular emphasis to one of the great European comic dramatists, the Portuguese Gil Vicente. Tom Earle is King John II Professor of Portuguese at Oxford. Catarina Fouto is a Lecturer in Portuguese at King's College London.

The theatre of the Italian Renaissance was directly inspired by the classical stage of Greece and Rome, and many have argued that the former imitated the latter without developing a new theatre tradition. In this book, Salvatore DiMaria investigates aspects of innovation that made Italian Renaissance stage a modern, original theatre in its own right. He provides important evidence for creative imitation at work by comparing sources and imitations – incuding Machiavelli's Mandragola and Clizia, Cecchi's Assiuolo, Groto's Emilia, and Dolce's Marianna – and highlighting source elements that these playwrights chose to adopt, modify, or omit entirely. DiMaria delves into how playwrights not only brought inventive new dramaturgical methods to the genre, but also incorporated significant aspects of the morals and aesthetic preferences familiar to contemporary spectators into their works. By proposing the theatre of the Italian Renaissance as a poetic window into the living realities of sixteenth-century Italy, he provides a fresh approach to reading the works of this period.

"This is a book worthy of high praise... All versions are exceedingly witty and versatile, in verse that ripples from one's lips, pulling all the punches of Plautus, the knockabout king of farce, and proving that the more polished Terence can be just as funny. Accuracy to the original has been thoroughly respected, but look at the humour in rendering Diphilius' play called Synapothnescontes as Three's a Shroud... Students in schools and colleges will benefit from short introductions to each play, to Roman stage conventions, to different types of Greek and Roman comedy, and there is a note on staging, with a diagram illustrating a typical Roman stage and further diagrams of the basic set for each play. The translators have paid more attention to stage directions than is usually given in translations, because they aim to show how these plays worked.

Written in 1159 and addressed to Thomas Becket, John of Salisbury's The Metalogicon presents -- and defends -- a thorough study of the liberal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The very name "Metalogicon", a coinage by the author, brings together the Greek meta (on behalf of) and logicon (logic or logical studies). Thus, in naming his text, he also explained it. With this lucid treatise on education, John of Salisbury urges a thorough grounding in the arts of words (oral and written) and reasoning, as these topics are addressed in grammar and logic. Written more than nine hundred years ago, The Metalogicon still possesses an invigorating originality that invites readers to refresh themselves at the sources of Western learning.