“The acclaimed author of Lemprière’s Dictionary furnishes another richly textured romp steeped in history, legend, and excitement.” —Booklist The Pope’s Rhinoceros is a vivid, antic, and picaresque novel spun around one of history’s most bizarre chapters: the sixteenth-century attempt to procure a rhinoceros as a bribe for Pope Leo X. In February 1516, a Portuguese ship sank off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora de Ajuda had sailed fourteen thousand miles from the Indian kingdom of Gujarat. Her mission: to bribe the “pleasure-loving Pope” into favoring expansionist Portugal over her rival Spain with the most exotic and least likely of gifts — a living rhinoceros. Moving from the herring colonies of the Baltic Sea to the West African rain forest, with a cast of characters including an order of reclusive monks and Rome’s corrupt cardinals, courtesans, ambassadors, and nobles, The Pope’s Rhinoceros is at once a fantastic adventure tale and a portrait of an age rushing headlong to its crisis. “An exhausting banquet of a book . . . One of the most original, energetic, and ambitious novels of recent years.” —Kirkus Reviews “Mr. Norfolk’s heady originality and intellectual energy are apparent on every page.” —The New York Times Book Review

"The rhinoceros, that is, any powerful man, is bound with a thong so that he may crush the clods of the valleys, that is, the oppressors of the humble."—Odo of Cluny, Vita Geraldi i.8 To the second abbot of the great monastery at Cluny, Saint Odo, tenth-century Europe was a world filled with violent men oppressing at whim the poor and the powerless. As royal authority waned, local magnates, unrestrained by any authority, divine or human, seized the opportunity to enhance their positions. Odo, along with Cluny's other founding spiritual and ideological leaders, created within the protective walls of the monastery a model of restraint, instituting in place of the instability of everyday life an interpretation of the Benedictine Rule that stressed ritual, order, and lawfulness. Such were the beginnings of the monastery that Pope Urban II in the eleventh century would call "the light of the world," the fountainhead of what would become one of the most far-reaching religious reform movements in European history. Barbara Rosenwein in Rhinoceros Bound focuses on Cluny's founding and early growth within the context of a society shaped by the needs of those set adrift in the social upheaval of the tenth century. Examining in the first chapter traditional approaches to Cluniac studies, the author reveals that historians have generally considered Cluny's eleventh-century role in church reform without analyzing the peculiar combination of forces and founders that created the Cluniac ideal and gave it its original momentum. This fundamental problem is the topic of the second chapter. She then examines how the early Cluniacs perceived the world outside the monastery and how they viewed their own world inside of it. Rosenwein concludes with a chapter on Cluny in the tenth century that combines traditional historical techniques with contemporary sociological insights. She provides in this study a significant reassessment of a period crucial to the political development of Europe, as well as a case study of institutional response to acute and political change.

In the remote village of Buckland, a mob chants of witchcraft. It is 1625, and John and his mother are running for their lives. Taking refuge among the trees of Buccla's Wood, John's mother opens her book and begins to tell her son of an ancient Feast kept in secret down the generations. Little does he know that one day, to keep hold of all that he holds most dear, he most realize his mother's vision - he must serve the Saturnall Feast.

The Somerset Maugham Prize–winning, international bestselling debut novel: “a dazzling linguistic and formal achievement” set in 18th century London (Salman Rushdie). In eighteenth-century London, John Lempriere works feverishly on a celebrated dictionary of classical mythology that bears his name. But when he discovers a conspiracy against his family dating back 150 years, he embarks on a personal mission that will pit him against enemies he never new he had, allies he never thought he would ever want, and a destiny he never imagined . . . Told with the narrative drive of a political thriller and a Dickensian panorama of place and time, this “superbly entertaining” tale encompasses multinational conspiracies and a motley cast of scholars, eccentrics, prostitutes, assassins, drunken aristocrats, and octogenarian pirates—all brilliantly depicted across three continents and the world of classical mythology (The Washington Post).

One animal left India in 1515, caged in the hold of a Portuguese ship, and sailed around Africa to Lisbon—the first of its species to see Europe for more than a thousand years. The other crossed the Atlantic from South America to Madrid in 1789, its huge fossilized bones packed in crates, its species unknown. How did Europeans three centuries apart respond to these two mysterious beasts—a rhinoceros, known only from ancient texts, and a nameless monster? As Juan Pimentel explains, the reactions reflect deep intellectual changes but also the enduring power of image and imagination to shape our understanding of the natural world. We know the rhinoceros today as “Dürer’s Rhinoceros,” after the German artist’s iconic woodcut. His portrait was inaccurate—Dürer never saw the beast and relied on conjecture, aided by a sketch from Lisbon. But the influence of his extraordinary work reflected a steady move away from ancient authority to the dissemination in print of new ideas and images. By the time the megatherium arrived in Spain, that movement had transformed science. When published drawings found their way to Paris, the great zoologist Georges Cuvier correctly deduced that the massive bones must have belonged to an extinct giant sloth. It was a pivotal moment in the discovery of the prehistoric world. The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium offers a penetrating account of two remarkable episodes in the cultural history of science and is itself a vivid example of the scientific imagination at work.

"Learn all about black rhinos, including where they live, why they are endangered, and how people are working together to save them. Chapters explain physical characteristics and behaviors as well. Additional features include full-color photographs, informative sidebars, detailed maps, a glossary of key words and phrases, and an introduction to the author"--Publisher description.

Examines the court of Pope Leo X in sixteenth-century Rome, and discusses the popularity of the Pope's white elephant, Hanno, a gift from the king of Portugal.

Paul Revere's daughter describes her father's "rides" and the intelligence network of the patriot community prior to the American Revolution.

The rhinoceros is an iconic animal. Three species once inhabited South Asia, two of which disappeared over a century ago. This survey aims to reconstruct the historical distribution of these large mammals resulting in new maps showing the extent of their occurrences. Thousands of sources varied in time and nature are used to study the interactions between man and rhinoceros. The text is supported by over 700 illustrations and 38 maps showing the importance of the rhinoceros in the scientific and cultural fabric of Asia and beyond.

Twelve million years ago, rhinos, elephants, and camels roamed North America. They would gather at nearby watering holes—eating, drinking, and trying not to become someone else’s lunch. But one day, in what we now know as Nebraska, everything changed. The explosion of a supervolcano a thousand miles away sent a blanket of ash that buried these animals for millennia. Until 1953, when a seventeen-year-old farm worker made an unbelievable discovery. Rhinos in Nebraska tells the story of the Ashfall Fossil Beds, where more than two hundred perfectly preserved fossils have been found. Step into the past with author Alison Pearce Stevens and uncover the mysteries of Ashfall.