Renaissance Books - Page 4

Good Queen Bess : The Story of Elizabeth I of England

Diane Stanley, Peter Vennema

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

She was a queen whose strong will, shrewd diplomacy, religious toleranceand great love for her subjects won the hearts of her people and the admiration of her enemies.

Elizabeth was born into an age of religious strife, in which plots and factions were everywhere and private beliefs could be punished by death. When she became queen, her counselors urged her to marry quickly and turn the responsibilities of governing over to her husband, But she outwitted them by stalling, changing her mind; and playing one side against another, as she steered her country to the glorious era of peace and security that would be called the Elizabethan Age.

Elizabeth's forceful personality, colorful court, and devoted subjects come vividly to life in this stellar picture-book biography. When it was first published, Good Queen Bess was named a Notable Book in the Field of Social Studies, an American Library Association Notable Book, a Booklist Editors' Choice, an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book, and an IRA Teachers' Choice.

In this welcome reissue, celebrated author and illustrator Diane Stanley and her husband, Peter Vennema, paint an impressive portrait of the remarkable queen who loved her people so dearly and ruled them so well.

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford World's Classics)

Walter Pater

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Pater and the Renaissance: Aesthetic Self-Help 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This book has changed many lives in a very
peculiar way: although its evaluations are
quite wrong at times, particularly the chapter
on the School of Giorgione(if you care, check
out the edition with an introduction by
Kenneth Clark), Pater's Renaissance still
shines with the very same light that made it a
cult among Victorian youngmen.

The "gemstone flame", the pervasive feelings
of which Pater invited us to share have not
vanished (in spite of the attempts of the
so-called modern art), and the book's
invaluable lesson is that you simply
do not need a fancy objet d'art to see
what true beauty is all about.

So basically this is what I have to say: if
you have ever derived aesthetic pleasure from
anything at all in life, you should read this
little book tomorrow. If you never felt any
such pleasure, you must read The Renaissance
right now, or you'll simply let the good
things pass you by. I mean it.

Editorial Review:

Oscar Wilde called this collection of essays the "holy writ of beauty." Published to great acclaim in 1837, it examines the work of Renaissance artists such as Winckelmann and the then neglected Botticelli, and includes a celebrated discussion of the Mona Lisa in a study of Da Vinci. The book strongly influenced art students and aesthetes of the day and is still valuable for the insights it offers and the beauty of the writing.

The Essays (Penguin Classics)

Francis Bacon

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Renaissance Socrates 5 out of 5 stars.
18 of 22 people found this review helpful.

It's useless to dig for just one or two epigrams to stand in for the totality of Bacon's penetrating genius in the "Essays." Though it is perhaps fashionable today to detract from him in order to praise Montaigne, it should be clear that Bacon is at least as indispensable. As terse as Emerson is expansive, Bacon's "Essays" are perhaps the most truly Classical (in spirit) prose in the English language. Fans of the Leo Strauss school should have a fieldday reading between the lines of the essays "On Atheism" and "On Superstition"; for the rest of us, nobody can come away from even one of these essays without gaining invaluable insights. Though Bacon is rightly heralded for the radical newness of his pragmatic methods, he is ensteeped in history-- those mindful of Napoleon's dictum that history is the only true philosophy will certainly respond enthusiastically to Bacon's approach. From the post-Machiavellian insights of "Of Empire" to the pre-Enlightenment ethics of "Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature", one will find in reading Bacon's prose what the youth of Athens must have found in following Socrates: the presence of a benevolent, worldly-wise, supremely rational mind determined to show you the order of the world.

Editorial Review:

One of the major political figures of his time, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) served in the court of Elizabeth I and ultimately became Lord Chancellor under James I in 1617. A scholar, wit, lawyer and statesman, he wrote widely on politics, philosophy and science - declaring early in his career that 'I have taken all knowledge as my province'. In this, his most famous work, he considers a diverse range of subjects, such as death and marriage, ambition and atheism, in prose that is vibrant and rich in Renaissance learning. Bacon believed that rhetoric - the force of eloquence and persuasion - could lead the mind to the pure light of reason, and his own rhetorical genius is nowhere better expressed than in these vivid essays.

The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509-1659 (Penguin Classics)

Various

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A book for class I would have read for leisure 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I was assigned this book in an English Renaissance literature class. This collection provides a fascinating insight into the English Renaissance. There are selections by the normal poets: Shakespeare, Spenser, etc. There are also selections by female poets, including Elizabeth I. I learned so much from this book in terms of literature, culture, and life. If you are interested in this time period, or in the British Isles, this book is essential!

Editorial Review:

The era between the accession of Henry VIII and the crisis of the English republic in 1659 formed one of the most fertile epochs in world literature. This anthology offers a broad selection of its poetry, and includes a wide range of works by the great poets of the age - notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Sepnser, John Donne, William Shakespeare and John Milton. Poems by less well-known writers also feature prominently - among them significant female poets such as Lady Mary Wroth and Katherine Philips. Compelling and exhilarating, this landmark collection illuminates a time of astonishing innovation, imagination and diversity.

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd Edition

Walter Mignolo

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Editorial Review:

The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World. Exploring the many connections among writing, social organization, and political control, including how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, Walter D. Mignolo claims that European forms of literacy were at the heart of New World colonization. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that the Europeans valued. Yet no one but Mignolo has so thoroughly examined either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through language. The book continues to challenge commonplace understandings of New World history and to stimulate new colonial and postcolonial scholarship.
Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.

Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)

Anselm of Canterbury

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good Classic Christian Reading 5 out of 5 stars.
28 of 33 people found this review helpful.

Anselm was a very important author for Medieval Christianity. He contributed the Ontological argument for the existence (or should I say subsitence) of God, as well as formulating verbally the substitutionary atonement of Christ. This book provides these as well as a host of other rich classical Christian thoughts. It is difficult reading, but excellent in that it makes one think, believer or non-believer, in the metaphysical realities of life. I would have to say a must for anyone interested in the development of Christian thinking, as well as Philosophical development.

Editorial Review:

Although utterly convinced of the truth of Christianity, Anselm of Canterbury struggled to make sense of his religion. He considered the doctrines of faith an invitation to question, to think, and to learn; and he devoted his life to confronting and understanding the most elusive aspects of Christianity. His writings on matters such as free will, the nature of truth, and the existence of God make Anselm one of the greatest theologians and philosophers in history, and this translation provides readers with their first opportunity to read his most important works within a single volume.

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Canto)

C. S. Lewis

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

C. S. Lewis at Work 5 out of 5 stars.
40 of 40 people found this review helpful.

Lewis's fame as a writer of Christian apologetics, fantasy, and science fiction is such that it's easy to forget his day job: professor of medieval literature first at Oxford then Cambridge.

Although his professional output was fairly modest in quantity, in quality it enjoys a high reputation. His longer works include "The Allegory of Love", "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century", "Studies in Words", and "The Discarded Image". In addition to these, he also wrote a number of short works, which are published in this volume. To aid readers, I've listed the table of contents below:

Preface (by Walter Hooper)

"De Audiendis Poetis

"The Genesis of a Medieval Book"

"Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages"

"Dante's Similes"

"Imagery in the Last Eleven Cantos of Dante's Comedy"

"Dante's Statius"

"The Morte Darthur"

"Tasso"

"Edmund Spenser, 1552-99"

"On Reading the Faerie Queene"

"Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser"

"Spenser's Cruel Cupid"

"Genius and Genius"

"A Note on Comus"

Additional Editorial Notes

Index

None of these works are available in any other in-print collection (unusual for Lewis - his other shorter works have been collected multiple times in a variety of overlapping collections). As such, for those interested in the subject matter, this collection is highly recommended.

A second important collection of Lewis's writings as a literary critic is "Selected Literary Essays", which unfortunately is out of print and very hard to find. Another such collection to consider, (largely concerned with the science fiction and fantasy genres), is "On Stories, and Other Essays". That work is readily available.

Finally, those with a general interest in Lewis's shorter works may also want to get "Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces", which, as of the time of this writing, is available from Amazon UK but not Amazon US. That collection consists of about 130 short works by Lewis. While the collection centers around his writings on Christianity, it also includes a number of works of literary criticism, including all the works in "Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories".

Editorial Review:

This entertaining and learned volume contains book reviews, lectures, and hard to find articles from the late C. S. Lewis, whose constant aim was to show the twentieth century reader how to read and how to understand old books and manuscripts.

Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640

Katherine Henderson, Barbara F McManus

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The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford World's Classics)

Leonardo da Vinci

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Volume 1 is ok. Volume is NO (if you are an artist)! 3 out of 5 stars.
8 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I was hoping that after getting these books, I would learn some secret in art making from the great one, but I found them book very disappointing. Tons of texts and very few explanation.

However, the first volume is worth buying because it's about his drawing and painting theory. Beware they are very advance and i found them very confusing.

The second volume has nothing to do with art but rather pure science (Astronamy, sun, etc).

The first Renaissance man 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Nothing of Leonardo DAVinci's sketchbooks were published until the 20th century. These are some of the most important documents of the Renaissance, and they did not become known until the 20th century. There are still people who do not know how important this work was. His anatomical studies were a watershed moment, because they introduced visual diagrams as the standard for communicating knowledge of the body and self. This was no more and no less than the conviction that the true knowledge of the shape of any body could only be arrived at by seeing it from different aspects. The truth of the body, the truth of the human being can only be discovered by looking at the body from multiple aspects, like; level, motion, perspective, transformation and growth. He opened up the body, it had always been closed, now its open. Now, what goes on inside the body is going to give us the essence of what it means to be human. It is the internal struggle, the self with the self, within .you. When you look at his sketchbooks, you see just one place where the whole world opens up.

Leonardo DAVinci-- Leonardo DAVinci invented the modern self. He invented the modern self precisely in this way, through the perspective of disappearance. What he tells reality and us about the self is that it only exists by that which is perceived by the eye. Reality is a product of nature; reality is that which we perceive by the eye. Reality is only that by which we can see. Moreover, in his notebooks he gives us another foundational belief about the human subject and its form. That the sound rules are the issue of sound experience and observation. Experience and observation can only be our best teacher. Of course, this is also, what Voltaire is telling us to by the way. The challenge comes when we realize that we are both to the subject observing and the object that is observed. In our search for self, we experience a kind of division between our constitutions as objects and our constitution as subjects. However, when we look at the human form, when we look at the self we find that the body is in harmony with nature, and that it is in harmony within nature. How does DA Vinci make these kinds of claims? Alternatively, how does he ground these kinds of claims with the function of the eye or the power of the eye? Well, one of the ways he does it is thru the camera obscura. Earliest record of use of camera obscura is in DA Vinci's writings. The camera obscura gave birth to the science of optics, the science of seeing. It is with DA Vinci, that the science of seeing became the foundation of self-representation, a representation called the self, thus the representation of the human form. Now DA Vinci embodied his own concept of the painter, as philosophers. He saw painters principally as natural philosophers. To him, nature was all important, absolute, the image of the eternal. In one very significant passage of his notebooks, he defines the relationship of art to nature and its process of evolution. "The painter will produce pictures of small merit, if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. If he will study from natural objects, he will bear good fruit, as was seen in the painters after the Romans always imitating each other until their art constantly declined from age to age. Therefore, this was paramount for him in some ways what he was doing, and thinking was very radical and revolutionary and in other ways, it was very traditional. He appears to be quite a traditionalist, he studied ancient sources, Greeks, medieval sources, he studied anatomy, and these traditions get him to compare the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the world. These analogies extend to everything that he attempted to trace, to record and to know about the human form. Comparisons between the arteries in the body and the underground rivers of the earth. The flow of blood to the head in relation to the circulation of water to the summits of mountains. How does blood get to your head? If you want to understand that then understand how water flows up to mountains. Blood when it bursts in the veins of your nose and water rushing out of a vein in the earth. Almost everything that occurs in the human body can be found in the natural world. His interest in these analogies becomes very evident in the notebooks and sketchbooks. Scholars argue that these microcosm and macrocosm analogies are more than outright comparisons that belong to a pre scientific age, they lead him to compare the study of the body and Ptolemy's study of the earth. Consequently to use Ptolemy's method in the geography as the starting point for his own systematic study of anatomy. Therefore, anatomy and geography here become one in DA Vinci's mind. The forms of the earth and those of the human body have a parallel. "Thus in 15 entire figures you will have set before you the microcosm on the same plan as was before me adapted by Ptolemy in his cosmology, and so I shall afterwards divide them into limbs as he divided the whole world into processes. Then, I will speak of the function of each part in every direction putting before your eyes a description of the whole form and substance of man as regards his movements from place to place by means of these different parts. Thus if it please our great author I may demonstrate the nature of men and their customs in a way I describe this figure." Therefore, within the human form and within the kind of intricate details of human anatomy he discovered a way of describing and recording, not only the geographical construction of the natural world, but of Divinity itself. And when you look more closely at the system he devised to study the body, the more carefully you look at his drawings of the human form the more clearly you begin to recognize how strikingly stunningly original it is.

Earlier authors had relied exclusively on verbal descriptions of the human body. The human body had been a verbal entity but he emphasis visual description and some of the illustrations he has to bring visual dimensions to the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle the descriptions put forward by these men he presents in visual terms in these kind of body scapes. In the course of 20 years, roughly from 1489 to the end of his life, he dissected about 19 corpses and became very much obsessed with dissection. He drew these parts of bodies in minute detail every part of the human anatomy, he would draw each piece separately, together and at different angles. He laid out bodies in his drawings to mime classical poses in painting. He is referencing the history of art with the poses and the visual representation of the human subject. It is presented to us that deeply challenge these values of human nature, of life and death of living form and the cadaver it really raises some profound questions. The problem is in order to get to those questions, in order to explore some of the deeper philosophical implications of his work you have to get past the gross factor and the moral and ethical questions that his work raises. He is an artist that works very consciously with the sense of the ethical lines that he is crossing; he is not an artist that wants to make you comfortable. He sees that blood gets in the way of his observations, so he advises that you make a model of the body part and then you draw it. Model making and scientific art go hand in hand for him. You have to reconstruct reality before you can represent it. Therefore, before you can draw what is real you have to make it yourself. One of the most striking features of the notebooks is the manner in which he presents his work to us. There are no criticisms of the shortcomings that he has discovered in earlier authors, he does not boast about his own accomplishments, his writing style is pedagogical, and he is writing a teaching manual with descriptions and advice. Therefore, if you want to draw a lung, here is how you should do it. What he is trying to do is to convey to a larger audience this method of presentation and by representing human form, he relies on diagrams, and his reliance apparently causes some serious problems for the printing presses of the day. It also caused real issues for publishers because of the graphic nature of the work.

This was very important for medicine. He shows us we can separate human emotions and passions from the human body in understanding human form, and what it means to be human. There is a purely clinical dimension and this other dimension of feelings and emotions, and they do not have to come together at all, this is radical.

Thus again, this inside outside, you see it everywhere in his work. Why are we fascinated with the painting of the Mona Lisa? Because of the question we always ask, what is going on inside? The study of the Mona Lisa, it seems to me has always been organized around precisely the question that drove DA Vinci in his research. All his sketches in this obsessive and fanatical devotion to drawing every part of the body in relationship to every other part of the body at multiple levels and multiple perspectives and in motion, outside inside. There is the outside, what is going on inside, isn't that why we are obsessed with this? This painting just demands that we try to find out what is going on underneath. The truth is underneath, behind her smile, something she is keeping from us. Yet she is revealing just enough of it to make us have to find out what is going on inside of her. It is that relationship once again between the inside and the outside.

I read this book for a graduate class in the Humanities. Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, art, and science.

Editorial Review:

This selection reveals a true Renaissance man, whose habit of rigorous enquiry, observation, and experiment, grounded in a philosophic system, led him to conceive of the universe as an organized cosmos corresponding to a work of art.