Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: • Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts • Guides to key critics, concepts and topics • An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research • Case studies in reading literary and critical texts • Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. The Renaissance Literature Handbook is a comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the "English Renaissance" or "Early Modern" period.

This new textbook provides students with a highly readable synthesis of the major determining features of the European Renaissance, one of the most influential cultural revolutions in history. Professor Nauert's approach is broader than the traditional focus on Italy, and tackles the themes in the wider European context. He traces the origins of the humanist 'movement' and connects it to the social and political environments in which it developed. In a tour-de-force of lucid exposition over six wide-ranging chapters, Nauert charts the key intellectual, social, educational and philosophical concerns of this humanist revolution, using art and biographical sketches of key figures to illuminate the discussion. The study also traces subsequent transformations of humanism and its solvent effect on intellectual developments in the late Renaissance.

Dana E. Katz reveals how Italian Renaissance painting became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence from the real world onto a symbolic world. While the rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews.

Pater's first major work, a study of kindred spirits in love of beauty. Criticized as a "demoralizing moralizer".--Jim Kepner ; Oscar Wilde's favorite book by Pater (Greif, p. 157) ; Includes essays on Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, da Vinci and Winckelmann.

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture examines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."

Scholarly traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have led us to assume that national traditions were defining in a way that they may not have been during the Renaissance, when Latin remained an international language. This collection interrogates the historical importance of national traditions, many of which depend upon geographical boundaries that took their shape only after the emergence of the nation state in the modern period. In a seminal essay on Scottish literature, R.D.S. Jack delineates the problems of defining a national literature. Zirka Zaremba Filipczak traces connections between Italy and The Netherlands while Jozef Ijsewijn examines the use of Italian models by neo-Latin authors and Francis M. Higman offers a preliminary study of European translations of Reformation authors. Paul W. Knoll reminds us that the division between western and eastern Europe dates from this century by demonstrating the impact of Italian humanism on Polish universities. Divisions among disciplines are also challenged by the contributors to this volume. Arthur F. Kinney brilliantly shows that literature is enriched by an understanding of historical and political texts. Jacqueline L. Glomski questions the division between historiography and art while Howard Mayer Brown indicates the importance of literary concepts such as rhetoric and genre for the Italian madrigal, and Norman K. Farmer, Jr, of theological texts for interpreting poetry. Minna Skafte Jensen traces the impact of a major reformer on some Danish poets. Conceptual forms of internationality are explored in essays by Bart Westerweel on time, Bruce P. Lenman on geography, and Karen Skovgaard-Petersena and Karin Tilmans on historiography. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a compelling and persuasive justification for an interdisciplinary and international aproach to the study of Renaissance culture.

Drawing together the latest research in the field, The Routledge History of the Renaissance treats the Renaissance not as a static concept, but as one of ongoing change within an international framework. It takes as its unifying theme the idea of exchange and interchange through the movement of goods, ideas, disease and people, across social, religious, political and physical boundaries. Covering a broad range of temporal periods and geographic regions, the chapters discuss topics such as the material cultures of Renaissance societies; the increased popularity of shopping as a pastime in fourteenth-century Italy; military entrepreneurs and their networks across Europe; the emergence and development of the Ottoman empire from the early fourteenth to the late sixteenth century; and women and humanism in Renaissance Europe. The volume is interdisciplinary in nature, combining historical methodology with techniques from the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology and literary criticism. It allows for juxtapositions of approaches that are usually segregated into traditional subfields, such as intellectual, political, gender, military and economic history. Capturing dynamic new approaches to the study of this fascinating period and illustrated throughout with images, figures and tables, this comprehensive volume is a valuable resource for all students and scholars of the Renaissance.