Renaissance

Italy has a long history of competitive games and sports, which was to a great extent inspired by the athletic contests of Antiquity. The human educators and the Renaissance rulers attempted to recreate the grandeur of Imperial Rome. Athletic excellence became an equally strong component of Italian culture during the Renaissance as in ancient Greece and Rome. Italy was the place to be for spectators and to train to be proficient in a variety of physical exercises. The main focus of this study is on how Renaissance Italy became the playground where royal tennis, the ancestor of the modern game, developed into a high cultural form of private court entertainment. The book regularly quotes from the text of the first book on tennis, Antonio Scaino's Trattato del giuoco della palla (Treatise of the Ball Game) of 1555, which was written as an instructive manual for the ballplaying courtier. Scaino's introduction of tennis laws enabled the aristocracy to draw a line between themselves and the populace who continued to play a crude type of the game in the streets.

Scholars of early modern France have traditionally seen an alliance between the kings and the bourgeoisie, leading to an absolute, centralized monarchy, perhaps as early as the reign of Francis I (1515-47). In From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy, eminent historian J. Russell Major draws on forty-five years of research to dispute this view, offering both a masterful synthesis of existing scholarship and new information concerning the role of the nobility in these changes.

Renaissance monarchs, Major contends, had neither the army nor the bureaucracy to create an absolute monarchy; they were strong only if they won the support of the nobility and other vocal elements of the population. At first they enjoyed this support, but the Wars of Religion revealed their inherent weakness. Major describes the struggle between such statesmen as Bellièvre, Sully, Marillac, and Richelieu to impose their concept of reform and includes an account of how Louis XIV created an absolute monarchy by catering to the interests of the nobility and other provincial leaders. It was this "carrot" approach, accompanied by the threat of the "stick," that undergirded his absolutism.

Major concludes that the rise of absolutism was not accompanied, as has often been asserted, by the decline of the nobility. Rather, nobles were able to adapt to changing conditions that included the decline of feudalism, the invention of gunpowder, and inflation. In doing so, they remained the dominant class, whose support kings found it necessary to seek.

This book traces the history of Ferdinand and Isabella in laying the foundations of a single Spanish state. An account is then given of their grandson Charles V's rule of Spain and his search for solutions to the challenges of a new empire in America. The author also charts how Charles bore the increasingly heavy burden of the Holy Roman empire with his struggle to protect it against Lutherans within and Turkish attack from the east. The final chapters concentrate on Francis I as ruler, warrior, defender of the Catholic Church and patron of the arts. Each chapter concludes with extracts from contemporary documents.

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Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe explores the history of gunpowder in Europe from the thirteenth century, when it was first imported from China, to the sixteenth century, as firearms became central to the conduct of war. Bridging the fields of military history and the history of technology—and challenging past assumptions about Europe's "gunpowder revolution"—Hall discovers a complex and fascinating story. Military inventors faced a host of challenges, he finds, from Europe's lack of naturally occurring saltpeter—one of gunpowder's major components—to the limitations of smooth-bore firearms. Manufacturing cheap, reliable gunpowder proved a difficult feat, as did making firearms that had reasonably predictable performance characteristics. Hall details the efforts of armorers across Europe as they experimented with a variety of gunpowder recipes and gunsmithing techniques, and he examines the integration of new weapons into the existing structure of European warfare.

Francis Bacon, writing in 1620, remarked that the magnetic compass, the printing press, and gunpowder changed the appearance and state of the whole world. Bert S. Hall focuses closely on the last innovation to examine the effects of changes in military technology on European history in the late Middle Ages and early modern era. Strategists, he writes, first used guns as a means of inducing panic in an enemy. When rival armies gained access to this technology, the psychological use of firearms gave way to their employment as weapons of mass destruction. With increased military power came a transformation in the power of states, allowing greater centralization and force. Military history buffs will find much of interest in these pages.

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Drawing on more than 40 years of research and combining narrative with analysis, R. J. Knecht describes the rise and fall of France in the sixteenth century clearly and authoritatively.

A leading Renaissance scholar shows how the end of one of history's most fascinating eras gave rise to the modern world. The Renaissance may have emerged out of the upheavals of the fourteenth century, but when did it end? And why? The renowned historian, Theodore Rabb tackles these questions in this engaging and deeply learned book, and in so doing recasts our understanding of European history.

From the revelations of classical statuary pulled from the Roman soil as the popes began rebuilding the city in the fifteenth century, to the myth of serenity that Venice constructed to conceal its physical and political fragility, to bloody yet cultured Florence under the Medici, Ingrid D. Rowland traces the worldly, unworldly, and otherworldly strivings of artists, writers, popes, and politicians during that great “outburst of mental energy” we know as the Renaissance.Here are Botticelli, whose illustrations for the Divine Comedy reveal him to be one of Dante’s most careful readers; the multifaceted genius of Leonardo; the astonishing mastery of Titian and the erratic brilliance of artists like Correggio, Caravaggio, and Artemisia Gentileschi; the enigmatic erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the decoding of which was the subject of the recent novel The Rule of Four; the Western fascination with the mysteries of Egypt; and the glittering spiritual ferment of late Byzantium, which as it collapsed passed on so many ideas to Renaissance Italy.But beyond its artistic accomplishments, Rowland writes, “Renaissance life at its most distinctive was the intangible, unworldly life of the mind.” In her pages astronomers and astrologists, poets and philosophers, pornographers and prostitutes jostle for attention with painters and sculptors. Among them the inquisitive Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher stands out as a polymath who ranged over nearly every field of knowledge. Even though his commingling of scientific observation and hermetic symbolism is now obsolete, he remains for Rowland “a builder of connections who insisted on seeing harmony in the midst of disorder”–and thus one of the most exemplary Renaissance figures of all.

Italian Renaissance universities were Europe's intellectual leaders in humanistic studies, law, medicine, philosophy, and science. Employing some of the foremost scholars of the time—including Pietro Pomponazzi, Andreas Vesalius, and Galileo Galilei—the Italian Renaissance university was the prototype of today's research university. This is the first book in any language to offer a comprehensive study of this most influential institution.

In this magisterial study, noted scholar Paul F. Grendler offers a detailed and authoritative account of the universities of Renaissance Italy. Beginning with brief narratives of the origins and development of each university, Grendler explores such topics as the number of professors and their distribution by discipline, student enrollment (some estimates are the first attempted), famous faculty members, budget and salaries, and relations with civil authority. He discusses the timetable of lectures, student living, foreign students, the road to the doctorate, and the impact of the Counter Reformation. He shows in detail how humanism changed research and teaching, producing the medical Renaissance of anatomy and medical botany, new approaches to Aristotle, and mathematical innovation. Universities responded by creating new professorships and suppressing older ones. The book concludes with the decline of Italian universities, as internal abuses and external threats—including increased student violence and competition from religious schools—ended Italy's educational leadership in the seventeenth century.