This popular text circulated widely in manuscript form and was printed in several editions between the late 15th and the early 18th centuries, in Latin, German, and Italian. The present volume represents the first time this work has been translated into English, bringing its colorful narrative to the attention of a wider audience. This edition also provides extensive footnotes, an appendix of rulers, and a lengthy introduction to Aeneas?s life and the context and relevance of this work.

Written in the mid-fifteenth century, Pope Pius II’s Commentaries are the only known autobiography of a reigning pontiff and a fundamental text in the history of Renaissance humanism. In this book, Emily O’Brien positions Pius’ expansive autobiographical text within that century’s contentious debate over ecclesiastical sovereignty. Presenting the Commentaries as Pius’ response to the crisis of authority, legitimacy, and relevance that was engulfing the Renaissance papacy, she shows how the Commentaries function as both an aggressive assault on the papal monarchy’s chief opponents and a systematic defense of Pius’s own troubled pontificate and his pre-papal career. Illustrating how the language, imagery, and ideals of secular power inform Pius’ apologetic self-portrait, The Commentaries of Pope Pius II (1458–1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy demonstrates the role that Pius and his writings played in the evolution of the Renaissance papacy.

This collection of essays by eight leading scholars is a landmark event in the study of crusading in the late middle ages. It is the outcome of an international network funded by the Leverhulme Trust whose members examined the persistence of crusading activity in the fifteenth century from three viewpoints, goals, agencies and resonances. The crusading fronts considered include the conflict with the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean and western Balkans, the Teutonic Order’s activities in the Baltic region, and the Hussite crusades. The authors review criticism of crusading propaganda on behalf of the crusade, the influence on crusading of demands for Church reform, the impact of printing, expanding knowledge of the world beyond the Christian lands, and new sensibilities about the sufferings of non-combatants.

The confrontation between European countries and the expanding Ottoman Empire in the early modern era has played a major role in numerous fields of history. The aim of this book is to investigate the European-Ottoman interrelations from three angles. One deals with the circumstances: How did the Europeans meet the Turks in pragmatic and diplomatic connections? Another concerns imagery: how were the Turks depicted in literature and art? The third examines performativity: how were the Turks inserted into plays, operas and ceremonies? This book confronts mental, visual and embodied images with historical positions and conditions. The focus, therefore, is on the dynamic interactive processes of experience, embodiment and imagination in context. Bringing together Turkish and European scholars, it applies a number of research strategies used by historians to the history of art, literature, music and theatre. Contributions by Pál Ács | Robert Born | Asli Çirakman | Anne Duprat | Kate Fleet | Bent Holm | Marcus Keller | Maria Pia Pedani | Mogens Pelt | Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen | Günsel Renda | Pia Schwarz Lausten | Charlotte Colding Smith | Suna Suner | Dirk Van Waelderen

Global modernisms are marked by tremendous transformations in lifestyle, historical consciousness, cultural values, ethics, wars, and crises. This book emphasizes modernist connections within literature, culture, history, and media beyond the nation state and the bifurcation between East and West. Instead of deconstructing and separating, Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe composes and forges new combinations, linkages, and translations that place Chinese and European modernisms on an equal footing. This book features contributions on James Joyce, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anna Seghers, Qian Zhongshu, Weimar labor modernism, Chinese wartime literature, Chinese movies in divided Germany, and Sinophone modernity among other subjects.

Providing the first in-depth examination of Pope Pius II’s development of the concept of Europe and what it meant to be ‘European’, From Christians to Europeans charts his life and work from his early years as a secretary in Northern Europe to his papacy. This volume introduces students and scholars to the concept of Europe by an important and influential early thinker. It also provides Renaissance specialists who already know him with the fullest consideration to date of how and why Pius (1405–1464) constructed the idea of a unified European culture, society, and identity. Author Nancy Bisaha shows how Pius’s years of travel, his emotional response to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the impact of classical ethnography and other works shaped this compelling vision—with close readings of his letters, orations, histories, autobiography, and other works. Europeans, as Pius boldly defined them, shared a distinct character that made them superior to the inhabitants of other continents. The reverberations of his views can still be felt today in debates about identity, ethnicity, race, and belonging in Europe and more generally. This study explores the formation of this problematic notion of privilege and separation—centuries before the modern era, where most scholars have erroneously placed its origins. From Christians to Europeans adds substantially to our understanding of the Renaissance as a critical time of European self-fashioning and the creation of a modern "Western" identity. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the formation of modern Europe, intellectual history, cultural studies, and the history of Renaissance Europe, late medieval Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.

This edited volume aims to advance a Muslim-centered perspective on the study of Islam in Europe. To do so, it brings together a range of case studies that illustrate how European Muslims engaged with their Sacred Scripture while being part of a Christian-dominated social and political space. The research presented in this volume seeks to analyse Muslims’ practices of translating, interpreting and using the Qur’an as a sacred object and, thus, pursues three main research agendas. Part I focuses on the issues of Muslim-Christian relations in Europe and studies how these relations have engendered discursive connections between Muslim- and Christian-produced texts related to the study and interpretation of the Qur’an. Part II aims to bring scholarly attention to the under-represented cases of Muslim communities in Europe. This part introduces new research on Polish-Belarusian, Daghestani, Bosnian and Kazan Tatars and examines local traditions of producing vernacular Qur’ans and commodification of Qur’anic manuscripts. The final section of the volume, Part III, contributes to filling in the gaps related to the theoretical and conceptual framing of Muslim translation activities. The history of religious thought and practice in European history is in many ways still uncharted territory. This book aims to contribute to a better understanding of the cultural history of the Qur’an and Muslim agency in interpreting, transmitting and translating the Sacred Scripture.