Fully illustrated throughout, The Renaissance is a highly accessible and colourful journey along the cultural contours of Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the early modern period.
The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: Renaissance to Revolution provides a thorough introduction to the military and naval history of the years 1492 to 1792, covering the period from the European Renaissance to the revolutionary wars of the late eighteenth century. Detailed colour maps, battle plans, and colour and black-and-white illustrations combine with an authoritative text to illuminate developments in warfare on both land and sea. Particular attention is paid to the effects of European military expansion on the rest of the world including the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean. Special feature panels are devoted to key events, to the more complicated and intriguing military confrontations, to individual tacticians and to the key topics such as weapons, battle strategies, the rise of naval warfare, and the composition of armies. The book is written by a leading historian of the early modern period.
Uses maps to trace the history and development of the Christian church, and describes the international church today, images of Christ, religious orders, holidays, and church music and buildings
We usually see the Renaissance as a marked departure from older traditions, but Renaissance scholars often continued to cling to the teachings of the past. For instance, despite the evidence of their own dissections, which contradicted ancient and medieval texts, Renaissance anatomists continued to teach those outdated views for nearly two centuries. In Books of the Body, Andrea Carlino explores the nature and causes of this intellectual inertia. On the one hand, anatomical practice was constrained by a reverence for classical texts and the belief that the study of anatomy was more properly part of natural philosophy than of medicine. On the other hand, cultural resistance to dissection and dismemberment of the human body, as well as moral and social norms that governed access to cadavers and the ritual of their public display in the anatomy theater, also delayed anatomy's development. A fascinating history of both Renaissance anatomists and the bodies they dissected, this book will interest anyone studying Renaissance science, medicine, art, religion, and society.
The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg’s death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity’s afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought. While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg’s published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg’s cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West’s cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg’s lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.