Compared to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance is brief—little more than two centuries, extending roughly from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century—and largely confined to a few Italian city states. Nevertheless, the epoch marked a great cultural shift in sensibilities, the dawn of a new age in which classical Greek and Roman values were "reborn" and human values in all fields, from the arts to civic life, were reaffirmed. With this volume, Eugenio Garin, a leading Renaissance scholar, has gathered the work of an international team of scholars into an accessible account of the people who animated this decisive moment in the genesis of the modern mind. We are offered a broad spectrum of figures, major and minor, as they lived their lives: the prince and the military commander, the cardinal and the courtier, the artist and the philosopher, the merchant and the banker, the voyager, and women of all classes. With its concentration on the concrete, the specific, even the anecdotal, the volume offers a wealth of new perspectives and ideas for study.

This book explores representations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside Shakespearean exceptionalism, the study reads a wide variety of plays to explain how intellectual context could allow for such characterization.

A collection of essays, each tackling a Renaissance figure of speech in literature.

Why were so many late-nineteenth-century homosexuals passionate about the Italian Renaissance? This book answers that question by showing how the Victorian coupling of criminality with self-fashioning under the sign of the Renaissance provided queer intellectuals with an enduring model of ruthlessly permissive individualism.

During his brief literary career, Sir Philip Sidney created three major works, The Old Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, and The New Arcadia, in whichthe female characters became progressively stronger and more completely developed. A close examination of his major female characters - Gynecia, Stella, Cecropia, Philoclea, and Pamela - along with a study of commonplace Renaissance concepts about women, reveals that Sidney's female characters deviate considerably from the conventions of his time. Sidney may well have been influenced by the women in his family, his queen, and his religion in his creation of female characters who broke the boundaries of stereotypes.

At her glass-blowing apprenticeship, Renaissance reveler Jessie Morton?s crabby boss and his creepy nephew are causing her problems. But when the man playing the Grim Reaper is killed, Jess has to find the lady, lord or serf whodunit.