Publisher Description

Erik Satie (1866-1925) came of age in the bohemian subculture of Montmartre, with its artists' cabarets and cafés-concerts. Yet apologists have all too often downplayed this background as potentially harmful to the reputation of a composer whom they regarded as the progenitor of modern French music. Whiting argues, on the contrary, that Satie's two decades in and around Montmartre decisively shaped his aesthetic priorities and compositional strategies. He gives the fullest account to date of Satie's professional activities as a popular musician, and of how he transferred the parodic techniques and musical idioms of cabaret entertainment to works for concert hall. From the esoteric Gymnopédies to the bizarre suites of the 1910s and avant-garde ballets of the 1920s (not to mention music journalism and playwriting), Satie's output may be daunting in its sheer diversity and heterodoxy; but his radical transvaluation of received artistic values makes far better sense once placed in the fascinating context of bohemian Montmartre.

A distinctive history of the traditions of reading and life in the Renaissance library, as seen in the texts of Renaissance intellectuals

This book is a novel attempt to understand humanism as a socially meaningful cultural idiom in late Renaissance East Central Europe. Through an exploration of geographical regions that are relatively little known to an English reading public, it argues that late sixteenth-century East Central Europe was culturally thriving and intellectually open in the period between Copernicus and Galileo. Humanism was a dominant cluster of shared intellectual practices and cultural values that brought a number of concrete benefits both to the social-climber intellectual and to the social elite. Two exemplary case studies illustrate this thesis in substantive detail, and highlight the ambivalences and difficulties court humanists routinely faced. The protagonists Johannes Sambucus and Andreas Dudith, both born in the Kingdom of Hungary, were two of the major humanists of the Habsburg court, central figures in cosmopolitan networks of men of learning and characteristic representatives of an Erasmian spirit that was struggling for survival in the face of confessionalisation. Through an analysis of their careers at court and a presentation of their self-fashioning as savants and courtiers, the book explores the social and political significance of their humanist learning and intellectual strategies.

Traditionally, the history of Ancient Greek literature ends with Antiquity: after the fall of Rome, the literary works in ancient Greek generally belong to the domain of the Byzantine Empire. However, after the Byzantine refugees restored the knowledge of Ancient Greek in the west during the early humanistic period (15th century), Italian scholars (and later their French, German, Spanish colleagues) started to use Greek, a purely literary language that no one spoke, for their own texts and poems. This habit persisted with various ups and downs throughout the centuries, according to the development of Greek studies in each country. The aim of this anthology - the first one of this kind - is to give a selective overview of this kind of humanistic poetry in Ancient Greek, embracing all major regions of Europe and trying to concentrate on remarkable pieces of important poets. The ultimate goal of the book is to shed light on an important and so far mostly neglected aspect of the European heritage.

The textual monuments of Greco-Roman antiquity, as is well known, were a staple of Europe’s educated classes since the Renaissance. That the Reformation ushered in a new understanding of human fate and history is equally a commonplace of modern scholarship. The present study probes attitudes towards Greek antiquity by of a group of Lutheran humanists. Concentrating on Philipp Melanchthon, several of his colleagues and students, and a broader Melanchthonian milieu, a Lutheran understanding of Pagan and Christian Greek antiquity is traced in its sixteenth century context, positing it within the framework of Protestant universal history, pedagogical concerns, and the newly made acquaintance with Byzantine texts and post-Byzantine Greeks – demonstrating the need to historicize Antiquity itself in Renaissance studies and beyond.