John Jeffries Martin introduces the most recent scholarship on the history of the Renaissance. He considers not only humanists and artists, but looks at people from all classes, men and women alike. The themes covered in this collection include politics and society, identity and gender, religion and science. The focus is on Italian developments but aspects of the Renaissance in Germany, France, and England are also covered.
The contributors to The Renaissance are among the most highly regarded scholars in the field. Their work has opened up new ways of thinking about the period from a variety of perspectives: from the history of the body to new ways of thinking about the relation of culture to power. Clearly the Renaissance remains a vital area of research, even as scholars grow increasingly sceptical about their ability to trace the origins of their own world back to this era in European history. It helped to shape modernity, but, as Martin argues in his provocative introduction, we are now looking back to the Renaissance from a post-modern perspective.

John Jeffries Martin introduces the most recent scholarship on the history of the Renaissance. He considers not only humanists and artists, but looks at people from all classes, men and women alike. The themes covered in this collection include politics and society, identity and gender, religion and science. The focus is on Italian developments but aspects of the Renaissance in Germany, France, and England are also covered.
The contributors to The Renaissance are among the most highly regarded scholars in the field. Their work has opened up new ways of thinking about the period from a variety of perspectives: from the history of the body to new ways of thinking about the relation of culture to power. Clearly the Renaissance remains a vital area of research, even as scholars grow increasingly sceptical about their ability to trace the origins of their own world back to this era in European history. It helped to shape modernity, but, as Martin argues in his provocative introduction, we are now looking back to the Renaissance from a post-modern perspective.

With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses the history of ideas, political history, cultural history and art history, this volume, in the successful Routledge Worlds series, offers a sweeping survey of Europe in the Renaissance, from the late thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries, and shows how the Renaissance laid key foundations for many aspects of the modern world.

Collating thirty-four essays from the field's leading scholars, John Jeffries Martin shows that this period of rapid and complex change resulted from a convergence of a new set of social, economic and technological forces alongside a cluster of interrelated practices including painting, sculpture, humanism and science, in which the elites engaged.

Unique in its balance of emphasis on elite and popular culture, on humanism and society, and on women as well as men, The Renaissance World grapples with issues as diverse as Renaissance patronage and the development of the slave trade.

Beginning with a section on the antecedents of the Renaissance world, and ending with its lasting influence, this book is an invaluable read, which students and scholars of history and the Renaissance will dip into again and again.

With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses the history of ideas, political history, cultural history and art history, this volume, in the successful Routledge Worlds series, offers a sweeping survey of Europe in the Renaissance, from the late thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries, and shows how the Renaissance laid key foundations for many aspects of the modern world. Collating thirty-four essays from the field's leading scholars, John Jeffries Martin shows that this period of rapid and complex change resulted from a convergence of a new set of social, economic and technological forces alongside a cluster of interrelated practices including painting, sculpture, humanism and science, in which the elites engaged. Unique in its balance of emphasis on elite and popular culture, on humanism and society, and on women as well as men, The Renaissance World grapples with issues as diverse as Renaissance patronage and the development of the slave trade. Beginning with a section on the antecedents of the Renaissance world, and ending with its lasting influence, this book is an invaluable read, which students and scholars of history and the Renaissance will dip into again and again.

An award-winning historian's revisionary account of the early modern world, showing how apocalyptic ideas stimulated political, religious, and intellectual transformations "A masterful synthesis of the prognostications of faith, knowledge, and politics on a global stage. Martin's book illuminates one of the enduring themes that shaped the medieval and early modern world."-Paula E. Findlen, Stanford University In this revelatory immersion into the apocalyptic, messianic, and millenarian ideas and movements that created the modern world, John Jeffries Martin performs a kind of empathic time travel, entering into the psyche, spirituality, and temporalities of a cast of historical actors in profound moments of discovery. He argues that religious faith-Christian, Jewish, and Muslim-did not oppose but rather fostered the making of a modern scientific spirit, buoyed along by a providential view of history and nature, and a deep conviction in the coming End of the World. Through thoughtful attention to the primary sources, Martin re-reads the Renaissance, excavating a religious foundation at the core of even the most radical empirical thinking. Familiar icons like Ibn Khaldun, Columbus, Isaac Luria, and Francis Bacon emerge startlingly fresh and newly gleaned, agents of a history formerly untold and of a modern world made in the image of its imminent end.

Leading scholars from Italy and the United States offer a fresh and nuanced image of the religious reform movements on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. United in their conviction that religious ideas can only be fully understood in relation to the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which they develop, these scholars explore a wide range of protagonists from popes, bishops, and inquisitors to humanists and merchants, to artists, jewelers, and nuns. What emerges is a story of negotiations, mediations, compromises, and of shifting boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy. This book is essential reading for all students of the history of Christianity in early modern Europe.

Renaissance Venice is generally portrayed as a city of harmony and consensus. This book offers a sharply different view by highlighting the history of religious dissent in this early modern city. Drawing on sixteenth-century records from archives of the Roman Inquisition, John Jeffries Martin reconstructs the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics--those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform. Among them were Evangelists, Protestants, Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, and Millenarians, whose ideologies ranged from moderate to radical. The protagonists included men and women from all social classes; but artisans, above all those in the elite crafts, proved especially likely to give their support to the new reform ideas. Martin's analysis, which explores the interconnections of religious beliefs and social experience, offers new perspectives on the Italian Reformation and demonstrates widespread persistent popular support for this reform of church and society well after the establishment of the Roman Inquisition in the 1540s.