Renaissance category: 1000 books
Four Princes
Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2017
“Bad behavior makes for entertaining history” in this bold history of Europe, the Middle East, and the men who ruled them in the early sixteenth century (Kirkus Reviews).
John Julius Norwich—“the very model of a popular historian”—is acclaimed for his distinctive ability to weave...
by Henry Kamen
Language: English
Release Date: July 13, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: July 13, 2010
The Cardinal's Hat
Money, Ambition, and Everyday Life in the Court of a Borgia Prince
Language: English
Release Date: May 2, 2006
“A riveting portrait of the day-to-day life of a wealthy, worldly Renaissance prince” as he pursues power and influence in the Catholic church (USA Today).
The second son of Alfonso d’Este and Lucretia Borgia, the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara, Ippolito d’Este was made the archbishop of Milan...
by Baldassare Castiglione
Language: English
Release Date: March 7, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: March 7, 2012
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...
Learning from Leonardo
Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius
Language: English
Release Date: November 19, 2013
Leonardo da Vinci was a brilliant artist, scientist, engineer, mathematician, architect, inventor, writer, and even musician—the archetypal Renaissance man. But he was also, Fritjof Capra argues, a profoundly modern man. Not only did Leonardo invent the empirical scientific method over a century...
by Robert Grey Reynolds Jr
Language: English
Release Date: March 16, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: March 16, 2015
Sandro Botticelli and Simonetta Vespucci depend upon one another for their fame in many respects. The Genoan beauty who came to Florence as a teenager was the subject of many of Botticelli's paintings, including his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus. Had there been no Simonetta Botticelli might have...
by Cecilia Ady
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2018
A HISTORY of Milan, under the House of Sforza, can hardly incur the charge of being superfluous. While Rome, Florence and Venice have each found English historians, and while fresh books on Renaissance Italy appear every day, no English writer has told the story of the Sforza as a whole. The scant...
by Jean de Sismondi
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2018
When Innocent III. died, vast sums began to pour into the Roman banks. It was evident that the Papacy was for sale to the highest bidder, and that the bidding would run high. One of the competitors, Roderigo Borgia, the nephew of Calixtus III., was a man of great wealth. He expended it lavishly, and...
Galileo
Watcher of the Skies
Language: English
Release Date: October 26, 2010
“Demonstrates an awesome command of the vast Galileo literature . . . [Wootton] excels in boldly speculating about Galileo’s motives” (The New York Times Book Review).
Tackling Galileo as astronomer, engineer, and author, David Wootton places him at the center of Renaissance culture. He...
by Jacob Burckhardt
Language: English
Release Date: August 26, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: August 26, 2010
Pioneering art historian Jacob Burckhardt saw the Italian Renaissance as no less than the beginning of the modern world. In this hugely influential work he argues that the Renaissance's creativity, competitiveness, dynasties, great city-states and even its vicious rulers sowed the seeds of a new era.
GREAT...
Francis I
The Maker of Modern France
Language: English
Release Date: April 10, 2018
The bestselling author of Catherine de Medici returns to sixteenth-century Europe in this evocative and entertaining biography that recreates a remarkable era of French history and brings to life a great monarch—Francis I—who turned France into a great nation.
Catherine de Medici’s father-in-law,...
A Sudden Terror
the plot to murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2009
D'Elia offers a compelling, surprising story that reveals a Renaissance world that witnessed the rebirth of interest in the classics, a thriving homoerotic culture, the clash of Christian and pagan values, the contest between republicanism and a papal monarchy, and tensions separating Christian Europeans and Muslim Turks.
The Art of Executing Well
Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2008
In Renaissance Italy a good execution was both public and peaceful—at least in the eyes of authorities. In a feature unique to Italy, the people who prepared a condemned man or woman spiritually and psychologically for execution were not priests or friars, but laymen. This volume includes some of the...