For review see: J.W. Schulte Nordholt, in Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, jrg. 107, nr. 4 (1994); p. 591-592.

This book offers a series of explorations of the cultural interactions (social, political, economic, religious and artistic) that were instrumental in articulating how the empires of Byzantium and the West each defined themselves amid and against one another.

The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early modern and the present. Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing, and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East Asia. Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, “long-view” of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of contemporary importance.

The cross-cultural exchange of ideas that flourished in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries profoundly affected European and Islamic society. Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires considers the role and place of gardens and landscapes in the broader context of the information sharing that took place among Europeans and Islamic empires in Turkey, Persia, and India. In illustrating commonalities in the design, development, and people’s perceptions of gardens and nature in both regions, this volume substantiates important parallels in the revolutionary advancements in landscape architecture that took place during the era. The contributors explain how the exchange of gardeners as well as horticultural and irrigation techniques influenced design traditions in the two cultures; examine concurrent shifts in garden and urban landscape design, such as the move toward more public functionality; and explore the mutually influential effects of politics, economics, and culture on composed outdoor space. In doing so, they shed light on the complexity of cultures and politics during the Renaissance. A thoughtfully composed look at the effects of cross-cultural exchange on garden design during a pivotal time in world history, this thought-provoking book points to new areas in inquiry about the influences, confluences, and connections between European and Islamic garden traditions. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Cristina Castel-Branco, Paula Henderson, Simone M. Kaiser, Ebba Koch, Christopher Pastore, Laurent Paya, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Jill Sinclair, and Anatole Tchikine.

More than just an expression of religious authority or an instrument of social control, the Inquisition was an arena where cultures met and clashed on both shores of the Atlantic. This pioneering volume examines how cultural identities were maintained despite oppression. Persecuted groups were able to survive the Inquisition by means of diverse strategies—whether Christianized Jews in Spain preserving their experiences in literature, or native American folk healers practicing medical care. These investigations of social resistance and cultural persistence will reinforce the cultural significance of the Inquisition. Contributors: Jaime Contreras, Anne J. Cruz, Jesús M. De Bujanda, Richard E. Greenleaf, Stephen Haliczer, Stanley M. Hordes, Richard L. Kagan, J. Jorge Klor de Alva, Moshe Lazar, Angus I. K. MacKay, Geraldine McKendrick, Roberto Moreno de los Arcos, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Noemí Quezada, María Helena Sanchez Ortega, Joseph H. Silverman This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Current historiography suggests that European nations regarded the New World as an inassimilable "other" that posed fundamental challenges to the accepted ideas of Renaissance culture. The German Discovery of the World presents a new interpretation that emphasizes the ways in which the new lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas were imagined as comprehensible and familiar. In chapters dedicated to travel narratives, cosmography, commerce, and medical botany, Johnson examines how existing ideas and methods were deployed to make German commentators experts in the overseas world, and how this incorporation established the discoveries as new and important intellectual, commercial, and scientific developments. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book brings to light the dynamic world of the German Renaissance, in which humanists, cartographers, reformers, politicians, botanists, and merchants appropriated the Portuguese and Spanish expeditions to the East and West Indies for their own purposes and, in so doing, reshaped their world. Studies in Early Modern German History

During the years 1500–1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.