Distributed in North America for Mercatorfonds.Charles the Bold (1433-1477) was ambitious, well educated, and tireless in his pursuit of power and recognition. At the close of the Middle Ages, in the fourth generation of his dynasty, he made the duchy of Burgundy into a significant European power. The house of Burgundy celebrated its rise by establishing a glittering court life, in which objects of exquisite taste were constantly sought after. The essays in Splendour of the Burgundian Court--biographies of rulers, political history, and analyses of court art--form a comprehensive portrait of the Burgundian court. Its splendid full-color illustrations vividly bring to life both the brilliance and the drama of the epoch.The dukes of Burgundy ruled over a conglomeration of territories, each with its own political and legal traditions. Because their dynasty was relatively new and flanked by the much more powerful French kingdom and German empire, Burgundian dukes invested in lavish public ceremonial displays to assert their status and reinforce the court's position as a center of power. The theater of Burgundian rule depended upon the display of ever more elaborate objects, from clothing and armor to furniture, tableware, tapestries, and paintings-many of which are of outstanding quality. Charles the Bold grew up on this ritualized stage, and his eventful life is reflected in the ceremonies and objects that conveyed his authority. Splendour of the Burgundian Court welcomes readers into that world.

This book is about the spectacles and ceremonies of society in the Low Countries. It is the first ever attempt to unite and translate some of the key texts which informed Johan Huizinga's famous study of the Burgundian court in The Waning of the Middle Ages, a work which has never gone out of print.

In the course of the fifteenth century, the reputation of the Burgundian court rose to an unprecedented level, catapulted forward by ever growing territorial ambitions and accumulation of wealth. This reached a climax during the reign of Charles the Bold (1433-1477), the living embodiment of the pomp and pageantry of the Burgundian court and a generous patron of the fine arts. Rather than focusing on a single domain, this volume aims to shed light on Burgundian court culture as an organic whole, between the start of the reign of Philip the Good (1419) and the death of Mary of Burgundy (1482). It is intended to provide a forum for new research from the fields of History, History of Art, Literature and Musicology. With contributions (among others) from Wim Blockmans, Herman Brinkman, Barbara Haggh, Andrea Berlin, James Bloom, Till-Holger Borchert, Andrew Brown, Hendrik Callewier, Anna Campbell, Mario Damen, Sonja Duennebeil, Jonas Goossenaerts, Bieke Hillewaert, Andrew Hamilton, Eva Helfenstein, Jesse Hurlbut, Sophie Jolivet, Sascha Kohl, Sherry Lindquist, Jana Lucas, Samuel Mareel, Elizabeth J. Moodey, Klaus Oschema, Kathryn Rudy, Emily Snow, Olga Vassilieva-Codognet, Hanno Wijsman.

European and English courtly culture and history reappraised through the prism of the court as theatre. In the past half-century, court history has lost the air of frivolity that once relegated it to the margins of serious historical study and has rightfully taken a central part in the study of European states and societies in the age of personal monarchy. Yet it has been approached from so many different angles and appropriated to so many different models that it can be hard to put all our new understandings together to achieve a proper perspective on the functions of the court as a whole. This collection of essays uses the idea of the court as a stage for social and political interaction to re-integrate different styles of court history, focusing on courts in England and the Low Countries from the age of Richard II and Albert of Bavaria to that of Elizabeth I and Philip II. Themes studied include the relationship between court politics and cultural change, the social and political functions of court office-holding, the military, judicial and propagandist roles of the court, the economic relationships between courts and cities and the wider social and political significance of court rituals and traditions.

This book brings together the surviving texts of the 113 talks on art and architecture that we know of, given by the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner on radio and television between 1945--1977. It includes the seven texts of the 1955 Reith Lectures in their original broadcast form, as well as lectures that Pevsner gave in German (for the BBC in London and RIAS in Berlin) and on the radio in New Zealand. These talks are important as an example of the attempt by the BBC in particular to provide intellectual programming for the mass population. The talks are important for what they reveal about changing tastes in the treatment of the arts as a broadcast topic, as well as offering a case study of the development of one particular historian's approach to a subject that was gaining ground in universities as a direct result of his popularisation of it. They show what topics were thought to be central to the artistic agenda in the mid-years of the last century, whether from an academic or journalistic perspective, and reveal the mode and manner of academic engagement with the public over the period. Forty-six of these talks were published in 2002, on the centenary of Pevsner's birth, in a trade edition. At the time, his reputation as an active force in architectural thinking had long been eclipsed and interest in him had waned. Since then, there has been a turn-around in tastes and Pevsner's role within his chosen field is now being actively studied and discussed by a new generation for whom he is central to an understanding of the 20th century. There is therefore a real need for this book. In addition to containing twice the number of talks as the previous volume, it is supplemented with explanatory introductions, footnotes and citations. It also reveals, as far as this is possible, alternative versions of Pevsner’s texts, as they appeared at different stages in the original production process. As such, this edition can be relied on by academics as scholarly and

Substantially revised second edition of the leading textbook on the Dutch Republic, including new chapters on language and literature, and slavery.

This volume explores the life, and more importantly, the effect William Caxton had both on the development of printed books in England, and on the literature accepted as 'literature' by the reading public. Caxton printed a wide variety of texts, but his choices seem to reveal two related motives: a persistent effort to make various kinds of books available to an audience unlearned in Latin and an equally steady insistence that what is read be morally profitable.

Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and remarkable history. Intimate and grand, learned and engaging, Michael Levey's Florence renders the city in all of its madness and magnificence.