England And The Continental Renaissance

This volume contains 23 essays which aim to shed new light on the evolution of English culture between the 15th and 18th centuries. Both the English cultural manifestation and its continental sources are discussed, and so, too, is the way in which these phenomena interacted.

This fourth edition of Sir John Hale’s classic history of England and the Italian Renaissance includes a detailed introduction by Edward Chaney surveying scholarly developments since the book was first published. Fourth edition of Sir John Hale’s classic history of England and the Italian Renaissance, first published in 1954. The book’s focus on fundamental issues and basis in little-read primary sources ensures that it endures as an important contribution to historical scholarship. Clear, chronological narrative, beautifully written. Provides essential understanding of the period, illuminating both British and Italian cultural history. The fourth edition includes a new introduction by Edward Chaney who is an expert on Anglo-Italian cultural relations. Chaney surveys the scholarship of the last 50 years and supplies an up-to-date bibliography.

The development of a coherent, cohesive visual system of mathematics brought about a seminal shift in approaches towards abstract thinking in western Europe. Vernacular translations of Euclid’s Elements made these new and developing approaches available to a far broader readership than had previously been possible. Scholarship has explored the way that the language of mathematics leaked into the literary cultures of England and the Low Countries, but until now the role of visual metaphors of making and shaping in the establishment of mathematics as a practical tool has gone unexplored. Mathematics and the Craft of Thought sheds light on the remarkable culture shift surrounding the vernacular language translations of Euclid, and the geometrical imaginary that they sought to create. It shows how the visual language of early modern European geometry was constructed by borrowing and quoting from contemporary visual culture. The verbal and visual language of this form of mathematics, far from being simply immaterial, was designed to tantalize with material connotations. This book argues that, in a very real sense, practical geometry in this period was built out of craft metaphors.

Studying texts by Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, Saint Jerome, George Gascoigne, and Fulke Greville, this volume explores authorial character as an instrument of textual analysis in the scholarship of early Renaissance literature.

This book reassesses Renaissance English literature and its place in Elizabethan society. It examines, in particular, the role of Italianate literary imitation in addressing the ethical and political issues of the sixteenth century.

The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word "critic" began, for the first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward criticism—and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood, marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise "branded with the dignity of a critic"—suggests that the position of the critic in this period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS