The Old Arcadia

Author	Baldassare Castiglione
ISBN	0486427021

Widely acknowledged as the sixteenth century's most significant handbook on leadership, The Book of the Courtier offers an insider's view of court life and culture during the Renaissance. Set in 1507, when the author himself was an attaché to the Duke of Urbino, the book consists of a series of fictional...

Author	Edmund Spenser
ISBN	0140422072

The Faerie Queene was the first epic in English and one of the most influential poems in the language for later poets from Milton to Tennyson. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united medieval romance and renaissance epic to expound the glory of the Virgin Queen. The poem recounts...

Author	Unknown
ISBN	0451528182

Contains the greatest "OH FUCK" moment in medieval literature!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - listed here as written by Unknown, though I believe it may have been penned by that prolific Greek author Anonymous - is a classic tale from Arthurian legend in which the code of honor attributed...

Author	Elizabeth Bowen
ISBN	0385720149

The Last September is Elizabeth Bowen's portrait of a young woman's coming of age in a brutalized time and place, where the ordinariness of life floats like music over the impending doom of history.

In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and...

Author	Heliodorus of Emesa
ISBN	0812216725

"Upon a rock sat a maiden of such inexpressible beauty as to be supposed divine. . . . Her head inclined forward without moving, for she was looking fixedly at a young man who lay at her feet. The man was disfigured with wounds, but seemed to rouse himself a little as from a deep sleep, almost of death itself....

Author	Thomas Nashe
ISBN	0140430679

Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was writing in the 1590s, the zenith of the English Renaissance. Rebellious in spirit, conservative in philosophy, Nashe's brilliant and comic invective earned him a reputation as the 'English Juvenal' who 'carried the deadly stockado in his pen.' In...

Author	Tobias Smollett
ISBN	0140433325

Roderick is combative, often violent, but capable of great affection and generosity. His father had been disinherited and has left Scotland leaving his son penniless. After a brief apprenticeship to a surgeon, the innocent Roderick travels to London where he encounters various rogues.

For...

Author	Nan Shepherd
ISBN	0862411416

Nan Shepherd is best known for The Living Mountain, her uniquely personal book about The Cairngorms which is rightly regarded as a classic piece of nature writing. This 1928 novel was her first published work.

At its core is a rites of passage novel, told largely in Aberdeenshire dialect - this...