The Book of the Courtier
10 best books like The Book of the Courtier (Baldassare Castiglione): The Treasure of the City of Ladies, The Heptameron, Mandragola, Jerusalem Delivered, The Autobiography Of Benvenuto Cellini, New Science, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The Italian Renaissance, Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, Famous Women
| Author | Christine de Pizan |
| ISBN | 0140449507 |
Written by Europe’s first professional woman writer, The Treasure of the City of Ladies offers advice and guidance to women of all ages and from all levels of medieval society, from royal courtiers to prostitutes. It paints an intricate picture of daily life in the courts and streets of fifteenth-century...
| Author | Marguerite de Navarre |
In the early 1500s five men and five women find themselves trapped by floods and compelled to take refuge in an abbey high in the Pyrenees. When told they must wait days for a bridge to be repaired, they are inspired - by recalling Boccaccio's Decameron - to pass the time in a cultured manner by each telling...
| Author | Niccolò Machiavelli |
| ISBN | 0917974573 |
Mandragola = The Mandrake, Niccolò Machiavelli
The Mandrake is a satirical play by Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Although the five-act comedy was published in 1524 and first performed in the carnival season of 1526, Machiavelli likely wrote The Mandrake in 1518 as...
| Author | Torquato Tasso |
| ISBN | 0801863236 |
Arguably the greatest Italian poet after Dante, Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento in 1544 and died in Rome in 1595, having served as the court poet in Ferrara, been confined for years in a madhouse after attacking a servant with a knife, and composed one of the great works of Renaissance literature....
| Author | Benvenuto Cellini |
| ISBN | 0140447180 |
Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who...
| Author | Giambattista Vico |
| ISBN | 0140435697 |
Barely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and laws of the ancient world. Discarding the Renaissance notion of the classical as an idealised model for the modern,...
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts...
| Author | J.H. Plumb |
| ISBN | 0618127380 |
Spanning an age that witnessed great achievements in the arts and sciences, this definitive overview of the Italian Renaissance will both captivate ordinary readers and challenge specialists. Dr. Plumb’s impressive and provocative narrative is accompanied by contributions from leading historians,...
| Author | Francesco Petrarca |
| ISBN | 0674663489 |
For teachers and students of Petrarch, Durling's edition of the poems has become the standard one. Readers have praised the translation as both graceful and accurate, conveying a real understanding of what this difficult poet is saying. The literalness of the prose translation makes this beautiful...
| Author | Giovanni Boccaccio |
| ISBN | 0674011309 |
The first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women, Famous Women affords a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential. Virginia Brown’s acclaimed translation...
'To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
The Renaissance (1873) at once became the touchstone for the decadent imagination for a generation of Oxford undergraduates. Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would...
| Author | Leon Battista Alberti |
| ISBN | 0140433317 |
Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435). Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion;...
| Author | Stanley Rosen |
| ISBN | 0375720111 |
An ideal introduction for the casual reader and a beneficial reference for the student, The Philosopher's Handbook features the writings of some of the world's most influential philosophers. Based on the premise that all human beings are curious about their existence, Rosen's collection brings...
| Author | Stephen Greenblatt |
| ISBN | 0226306593 |
Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and...
| Author | Matteo Maria Boiardo |
| ISBN | 1932559019 |
Like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Boiardo's chivalric stories of lords and ladies first entertained the culturally innovative court of Ferrara in the Italian Renaissance. Inventive, humorous, inexhaustible, the story recounts Orlando's love-stricken pursuit...
| Author | Eugene F. Rice Jr. |
| ISBN | 0393963047 |
In this compact study of the Renaissance and Reformation, Eugene F. Rice, Jr. draws together the main lines of change that account for a period of rapid transition from medieval civilization to early modern. From a chapter on science, technology, and the voyages of exploration, Professor Rice goes...
| Author | Jean Froissart |
| ISBN | 0140442006 |
The Chronicles of Froissart (1337-1410) are one of the greatest contemporary records of fourteenth-century England and France. Depicting the great age of Anglo-French rivalry from the deposition of Edward II to the downfall of Richard II, Froissart powerfully portrays the deeds of knights in battle...
Okay, I'm not going to sit here and pretend I read all of this. I'm not even going to claim that heretofore allegedly there may or may not have been a point the duration of which is uncertain that a person, namely myself, might have concurrently been disposed to a proportionate reading of the aforementioned...
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
| Author | Giordano Bruno |
| ISBN | 0803261047 |
"Among the heretics of every age, we find men who are filled with the highest kind of religious feeling," Albert Einstein said. He might have been referring to the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was tried by two Inquisitions and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.Bruno's...
| Author | J.R. Hale |
| ISBN | 0689122004 |
Read this for a history of Early Modern Europe course, and found it to be interesting but very much an overview of something I already have a decent idea of . Hale is synthesizing a lot of information here, and because of that there are just some points where the book gets borderline unreadable for a few pages....
| Author | Giovanni della Casa |
Il "Galateo ovvero de' costumi", trattato nel quale, sotto la persona di un vecchio idiota ammaestrante un suo giovanetto, si ragiona de' modi che si debbono tenere o schifare nella comune conversazione, così precisa il sottotitolo, fu pubblicato nel 1558 da monsignor Della Casa, nunzio pontificio...
| Author | Lisa Jardine |
| ISBN | 0393318664 |
In this provocative and wholly absorbing work, Lisa Jardine offers a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth — that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought. As Jardine boldly...
Orlando Furioso: Part One
| Author | Ludovico Ariosto |
| ISBN | 0140443118 |
One of the greatest epic poems of the Italian Renaissance, Orlando Furioso is an intricate tale of love and enchantment set at the time of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne's conflict with the Moors. When Count Orlando returns to France from Cathay with the captive Angelica as his prize, her beauty...
