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Subject Area: Literature - Renaissance
Pepin, Ronald E.1999 0-7734-7951-1 268 pages
Provides accurate English translations of eight Latin texts used extensively in schools during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The Auctores Octo (“eight authors”) was employed to impart moral values to youth and to teach them the Latin language. Among the works included are the famous Distichs of Cato and Eclogue of Theodulus, as well as collections of proverbs, fables, and a Biblical epyllion (Tobias). These are now made available in English for the first time as a complete set. Each work is prefaced by an essay on its author and content; a general introduction traces the history and vast influence of the “Eight Authors” over several centuries in European life and letters. The translation is based directly on an edition of Auctores Octo published at Lyon in 1538, collated against modern editions of the Latin where they exist. This book of ancient prestige and prominence is here offered anew in clear English prose to scholars of medieval and early Renaissance studies.
Chandler, Wayne A.
2005 0-7734-6206-6 328 pages
Commendatory poems are a type of praise-poetry, written by one author to accompany the work of another. The poems were printed in the same volume as the work they commend, to which the author refers to as the subject work. The majority of English Renaissance commendatory verse-which forms the majority of all such verse-has been out of print since its original publication.
Kambaskovic-Sawers, Danijela
2010 0-7734-3766-5 428 pages
Establishes the presence of ambiguous, polyvalent characterisation of the first-person voice in the Petrarchan poem sequence. It argues that such characterisation triggers a reader-response mechanism characterised by ambivalence and interest which could be called splintered identification. This means of identifying helps promote reader-involvement and foster the perception of the sequence as an integral work, concerns which betray the presence of novelistic thinking. This book contains two color photographs.
Horne, Philip
1996 0-7734-8749-2 224 pages
Epizia is a stage adaptation of Ecatommiti, VIII.5, Giraldi's tale of an errant Governor of Innsbruck, who gets the virginal heroine to his bed with a false offer of marriage and an equally false promise to let her imprisoned brother out of jail. He is sentenced to death by the Emperor for abusing his authority, but the magnanimous intercession of the peerless Epizia saves him from this fate and brings about the happy ending. The play will be of particular interest to students of English literature because of Shakespeare's elaboration of the Epizia story in Measure for Measure.
Ricapito, Joseph V.
1997 0-7734-8556-2 140 pages
Examines the narrative features and numerous textual aspects of the Novelas ejemplares, and also takes into consideration certain external aspects like intertextual features and specific concerns within narratology. It undoes the apparent 'placidity' of the surface text in order to study the sub-textual currents, connections that exist at the base of the apparent text.
Dureau, Yona
2011 0-7734-1582-3 704 pages
A translation from the original Latin of Francesco Giorgio’s De Harmonica Mundi that establishes its connections to Christian Cabbala in the early Renaissance. This book includes a CD.
Awarded the Adele Mellen Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship
Parkin, John
2008 0-7734-4924-8 188 pages
A complex analysis of the religious and feminist bases of de Navarre’s humor.
Jones, Thomas O.
2013 0-7734-4549-8 1064 pages
These two volumes are the first extensive study of the influence of Marsilio Ficino on major English poets. Ficino lived in Florence, Italy from 1433 to 1499. He introduced Plato to the Renaissance by his translations of the philosopher’s complete works with detailed commentary. He wrote important works on astrology, a multi-volume work on Platonic Theology, and hundreds of brilliant public letters on a variety of subjects.
Sauret, Martine
2005 0-7734-6289-9 324 pages
In French
Integrating different historical, sociological and philosophical perspectives, the book proceeds to closely study cartographers’ maps and their writings through visual elements such as letters, trompe-l’oeil, and anamorphosis, and show how this new medium influenced writings of sixteenth century, France. The work will explore the sense of the nation, will discuss the beginning of the autonomous geography of writing and the emergence of Renaissance values in France.
Thrasher-Smith, Shelley
1982 0-7734-0495-3 236 pages
Part of the series of works in Renaissance studies.
Shahar, Annette
2008 0-7734-5087-4 404 pages
This work is the study of the access of women to literature in sixteenth-century France, a period not considered to be conducive to the awakening of female writers. Focuses on the different steps of personal writing and the analysis of the women’s literary work. This book contains seven color photographs and six black and white photographs. In French.
Badescu, Sanda
2008 0-7734-4886-1 212 pages
Shows how Montaigne, in his Essays and Travel Journal, and Madame de Sévigné in her Correspondence live the tension between two contradictory and complementary inclinations of human nature: on the one hand, opening towards another, communication with a loved one, and, on the other hand, withdrawal, reflection, and distress.
Bromilow, Pollie
2007 0-7734-5332-6 224 pages
Offers a feminist critique of the so-called “crisis of exemplarity” in late Renaissance texts by comparing and contrasting examples proposed to female readers in two collections of sixteenth-century French short stories, Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires tragiques and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. The author proposes that female exemplarity has its own poetics and cannot be considered simply as identical or symmetrical to male exemplarity. What emerges in the course of the study is an understanding of the different ways in which exemplarity enters the life of the female reader: through history, truth, invention, memory and strangeness.
Litt, Dorothy E.
2001 0-7734-7397-1 236 pages
These essays are the work of thirty years of research in English Renaissance onomastics. They deal with subjects as varied as dance-names, namelessness and place-names in drama, nominal jests, the varied meanings of a place named Wilderness; names in graffiti, self-defining in subscriptions to familiar letters; and women’s names in elegies. Two essays are on political aspects: one concerning the name of the Earl of Essex, and another on naming in a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh to his queen. One essay concerns humanism and onomastics, another the organic function of onomastics in Shakespeare’s drama.
Noreña, Carlos G.
1990 0-88946-147-3 150 pages
Professor Noreña has made a readable translation of Vives' sometimes obscure and turgid Latin work on an Aristotelian philosophical concept of life and the soul.
Wong, Mitali P.
2006 0-7734-5687-2 284 pages
Rhetoric in sixteenth century English historical drama is intertwined with character development in relation to contemporary political paradigms. Recurring major political themes are those of strong rulership, stable government, the political responsibilities of the king, the peers, and the commons. Secondary themes are the need for monarchs to please their subjects, the need for both princes and peers to confront political reality with wisdom. This study concludes that Tudor dramatists were making the most of the politics of misunderstanding by exploiting the ambiguity inherent in rhetorical language. Tudor dramatists seriously questioned contemporary political doctrines by using oblique and “politic” rhetoric thereby shedding light upon the past in terms of the present in a fundamentally different way.
Almasi, Zsolt
2004 0-7734-6408-5 206 pages
Aims at reconciling “custom”, i.e. individual and social fixed patterns of behavior and human freedom, i.e. choice based on the use of reason to the extent that is allowed by the analysis of texts written in English in Early Modern England. The analysis, thus, focuses on the different but still related notions of “custom” as they appeared in the works of Wilkinson and Montaigne. This multidisciplinary approach, i.e. the combination of philosophy, literary studies and emblem studies opens new perspectives on the interpretation of Early Modern texts, and cultural phenomena.
Privitera, Joseph F.
1998 0-7734-7727-6 124 pages
This study reconstructs the grammar of medieval Italian, as used by Dante in his Vita Nova. It is divided into three parts: I – The Grammar; II – A listing of the medieval lexicon in the Vita; and III – a facing page translation of the medieval Italian and English translation of the Vita. This is a work long-needed by Romance language, Italian scholars, and Danteists.
Rolls, Albert
2015 1-4955-0332-1 468 pages
Synthesizes older and newer historical approaches to Renaissance texts in order to establish a reading of them that takes at its starting point the principles behind the period’s natural philosophy in order to reevaluate the theory of the king’s two bodies. Rolls presents a view of Renaissance thought that could adapt itself to new discoveries, and also turns to recent thinkers to interpret the material.
Passaro, Maria C. Pastore
2005 0-7734-6293-7 232 pages
Explores the discussion of the idealization of women in Medieval and Renaissance texts. Book's goals are: to show textual connections between literary masterpieces (and thus, delineate a literary history from within the texts) in order to show how authors consciously or unconsciously interact with one another regardless of time and boundaries; to present biographical and autobiographical heroines, their work and legacy; and finally to grasp man's imaginary world of women.
Gasser, Karen M.
1999 0-7734-7962-7 160 pages
Drawing upon epistemological and linguistic criteria, Gasser convincingly argues that the poem captures that precarious moment within the psychological history of the West when people move from a religious into a humanistic world view.
Takševa, Tatjana
2010 0-7734-3606-5 356 pages
Through the reading records of Donne’s poems and the concept of multiple referentiality, this study examines the social dimensions of early modern genres and the relationship among poetics, rhetoric and the Renaissance doctrines of imitation, placing systematic attention on how the differences oral and written modes of expression influences the process of reading and the early modern understanding of genre.
Malay, Jessica L.
2006 0-7734-5789-5 244 pages
Explores the complex constructions of social space in the texts of four Renaissance women. In the rapidly transforming social space of 16th and early 17th century England, Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Hoby Russell and Margaret Hoby created alternative spatial narratives that participated in, as well as challenged, the influential forces of their changing environment. This work places the texts examined within a theoretically informed discussion of the social spaces of Renaissance England, both physical and imagined. It challenges many ideas concerning a “woman’s place” offering instead a more complete and complex account of the spaces and places lived and imagined by Renaissance women.
DiScipio, Giuseppe
1995 0-7734-9000-0 366 pages
This study presents a detailed and thorough investigation of Paul's theological presence in Dante's opus: particularly the Vita Nuova, the Epistles, the Convivio, the Monarchia and the Divine Comedy
Rolls, Albert
2006 0-7734-5719-4 220 pages
Makes available for the first time the texts from which scholars have drawn to discuss the theory of the king’s two bodies. This study shows that the present-day discussions of monarchal power in the Renaissance have constructed a simplistic opposition between metaphysical, or so-called absolutist theories of kingship, and more materialistic theories of power.
McDonald, William C.
1990 0-88946-075-2 250 pages
Presents a fresh look at the German Tristan stories appearing after the Tristant of Eilhart von Oberge and the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, focusing on the main representatives of the genre from 1235 to 1553. Stimulates a rethinking of the standards by which we measure the achievement of the German Tristan poets who wrote from the 13th century onward.