The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of the Renaissance

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The 15th and 16th centuries marked a turning point for Western culture--when "civilization progressed from monochrome to technicolour," as Oxford historian Dr. David Rundle puts it. He should know, having amassed the collected wisdom of the cream of the scholarly crop, in The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. Over 1,500 entries comprising artistic, political, and religious figures and events fill the book, aiding the researcher and rewarding the casual browser with descriptions and histories of the whirlwind of novelties that sped through this period.

Gorgeous photographs of some of the greatest Renaissance paintings, sculpture, and architecture (including 29 color plates) from famous artists such as Fra Angelico and more obscure folks such as François Clouet accentuate the entries and inspire further reading. The book is extensively cross-indexed; this period marks the first intensive long-distance cultural communication since the fall of the Roman Empire, so the cross-links are important and complex. Maps, genealogical charts, and timetables complete the presentations, providing visual insight into this turbulent world. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of the Renaissance gives the reader a new perspective on the pioneers of our now thoroughly explored cultural territory and may just provide a map of what lies ahead. --Rob Lightner

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A complete guide to all aspects of the Renaissance throughout Europe

An authoritative companion to the Renaissance that deals with the period in the widest sense, covering not only Italy but developments in the arts, science, and ideas across Europe. The timescale is similarly broad, ranging from Cimabue to Titian, from Dante to Shakespeare, and including the early seventeenth century.

approximately 2,000 entries, providing a broader selection than the major competition 80 in-depth feature articles, developing key topics at greater length covers all of Europe-no other Renaissance encyclopedia currently has this range full thematic index, accessing specialist areas of interest comprehensively up-to-date bibliographies, offering the best and latest scholarship for further reading maps, genealogies, and lists, enriching the key information in unexpected ways 16 color, 50 black & white illustrations

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Initially decimated by disease and later faced with the loss of their lands and their political autonomy, Latin American Indians have displayed remarkable resilience. They have resisted cultural hegemony with rebellions and have initiated petitions to demand remedies to injustices, while consciously selecting certain aspects of the West to incorporate into their cultures. Leading historians, anthropologists and sociologists examine Indian-Western relationships from the Spaniards' initial contact with the Incas to the cultural interplay of today's Latin America. This revised edition contains four brand new chapters and a revised introduction. The list of suggested readings and films has also been updated.

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In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta's Grande MÃ©nagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor--in all, forty-two live animals. In Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, Louise Robbins explains that exotic animals from around the world were common in eighteenth-century Paris. In the streets of the city, residents and visitors could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which in 1760 became a major court attraction.

For Enlightenment-era Parisians, exotic animals both piqued scientific curiosity and conveyed social status. Their availability was a boon for naturalists like Buffon, author of the best-selling Histoire naturelle, who observed unusual species in a variety of locations around the city. Louis XVI saw his menagerie as a manifestation of his power and funded its upkeep accordingly, while critics used the caged animals as metaphors of slavery and political oppression amidst the growing political turmoil. In her engaging and often surprising account, Robbins considers nearly every aspect of France's obsession with exotic fauna, from the vast literature on exotic animals and the inner workings of the oiseleurs' (birdsellers') guild to how the animals were transported, housed, and cared for. Based on wide-ranging and imaginative research, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots stands as a major contribution to the history of human-animal relations, eighteenth-century culture, and French colonialism.

The Culture of Science in France, 1700-1900 (Collected Studies Series, Vol 381)

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The Culture of Science in France, 1700-1900 (Collected Studies Series, Vol 381)
Robert Fox
Manufacturer: Variorum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0860783391

Cultures in Conflict--The French Revolution (The Greenwood Press Cultures in Conflict Series)

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Cultures in Conflict--The French Revolution (The Greenwood Press Cultures in Conflict Series)
Gregory S. Brown
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0313317895

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The French Revolution remains one of the crucial events of modern European and world history. The changes wrought in French society, politics, and the church have been commemorated and debated for more than 200 years. This book introduces students to the French Revolution through an historical and cultural overview, as well as the contextual framing of primary documents of ordinary people's experiences in the dramatic conflicts of 1789-1799. Most of the documents are first translations into English for a North American audience. While a majority of sources on the French Revolution provide excerpts from formal documents, this volume reveals the deeper human level, offering immediate insight into everyday life. This is the perfect introduction to the Revolution, with many added-value features, including period illustrations, timeline, glossary, study questions directed toward the Advanced Placement European History exam, and a practical resource guide.

Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600-1700

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Distant Lands and Diverse Cultures: The French Experience in Asia, 1600-1700

Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0313308640

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Utilizing contemporary accounts of India, China, Siam and the Levant, this study provides rich detail about these exotic lands and explores the priorities that shaped and motivated these bold envoys and chroniclers. Ames and Love offer a fascinating look at the symbiotic nature of cross-cultural interaction between France and the major trading regions of the Indian Ocean basin during the 17th century. During this period of intense French interest in the rich trade and cultures of the region, Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert in particular were concerned with encouraging French travelers, both clerical and lay, to explore and document these lands. Among the accounts included here are those of Francois Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, and Francois Pyrard. Because these accounts reflect as much about the structures and priorities of France as they do about the cultures they describe, Ames and Love hope their analysis bridges the gap between studies on early modern France and those on the major Asiatic countries of the same period. Their findings challenge the current thinking in the study of early modern France by demonstrating that overseas expansion to Asia was of considerable importance and interest to all segments of French society. Specialists in traditional "internal" French history will find much in this study of European expansion to complement and supplement their research.

Edmund Burke's Reflections On the Revolution in France (Texts in Culture)

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Edmund Burke's Reflections On the Revolution in France (Texts in Culture)
John Whale
Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

In this volume, leading Burke scholars offer new and challenging essays which allow us to reconsider the historical context in which Reflections on the Revolution in France was written, its reception, its engagement in the discourses of nationalism and toleration, its legacy to English and Irish writers of the Romantic period, and its impact within our contemporary cultural and critical theory. The volume demonstrates a range of interdisciplinary critical methods and cultural perspectives from which to read Burke's most famous work.

Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Ideas in Context)

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Brilliant scholarly history, but a very dense read

Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Ideas in Context)
Keith Michael Baker
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521346185

Book Description

In this volume, Keith Baker, arguably the leading expert writing in English on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, collects together a range of his essays on this subject published in journals in recent years. The essays include historiographical studies of the treatment of the topic by French and other historians as well as important case studies on the political vocabularies characteristic of the ancien régime and the revolutionary periods. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies on one of the central themes in modern European history.

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Brilliant scholarly history, but a very dense read.......2001-07-17

Keith Michael Baker is a highly esteemed historian (previously at U. of Chicago, now at Stanford) of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This book is a collection of essays that are unified by their subject matter, which can be described as "the intellectual and ideological origins of the French Revolution".

A few of these essays are more historiographical/theoretical in nature. That is to say, they are more concerned with questions of how historians approach this subject and the methods and intellectual tools they bring to bear on it. These are quite smart (and extremely influential) pieces-- and they have a general applicability to the subject of intellectual/ideological history, and not just to the French Revolution. However, like all works of historiography/methodology, the questions they pose are probably not going to be of interest to anybody other than other historians. (That's a pity really, as these are important questions that history buffs, and even just ordinary folks probably *should* take some interest in...)

Most of the essays in "Inventing the French Revolution", however, are case studies of particular ways in which political ideologies were deployed and contested before and during the Revolution. One of the most important of these has to do with the practice of writing history during the eighteenth century, as well as the collection of documents, the creation of archives, etc. Far from being a disinterested practice, Baker shows, the writing of the past was a way of engaging in partisan political debate. There were royal historians who presented the French past in such a way that tended to legitimize the claims of the crown over those of the aristocracy-- and other historians who took the opposite approach. Libraries and archives were creted on both sides to serve as "ideological aresenals" to provide arms to conduct this ideological/political battle, which provided some of the "ground principles" on which the debates that led to the Creation of the Estates-General (and then the National Assembly) and other events in 1789 and beyond.

All in all, this is an extremely smart, thoughtful, and insightful book. However, it is also a dense book. Though Baker writes clearly , he deals with a lot of heavy, complicated, and abstract concepts-- and he treats them with the seriousness and complexity that they require, rather than oversimplifying them. Consequently, this can sometimes be tough reading for those more used to graceful stylists (like Peter Gay). Also, it should be noted that this is a book about the creation of the *ideologies* that were deployed in both the pre-Revolutionary and Revoultionary era. As such, it's a work of intellectual history, and of political ideology in specific. This means that its a book about ideas, their development, and their function in political discourse. Those expecting a dramatic narrative of the French Revolution that includes the storming of the Bastille and bloody guillotines will be sorely disappointed. Finally, in case it's not obvious from this review, it should be noted that this really is a work of scholarship, written by a professional historian, primarily for other historians. Non-historians who know a lot about the Enlightenment and Revolution may still get something out of this if they're thoughtful and patient, but it's *not* a work of popular history, or a work intended to be read by someone who's not already knowledgeable about the general subject.

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"There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime
Sue Peabody
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0195101987

Book Description

There Are No Slaves in France examines the paradoxical emergence of political antislavery and institutional racism in the century prior to the French Revolution. Sue Peabody shows how the political culture of late Bourbon France created ample opportunities for contestation over the meaning of freedom. Based on various archival sources, this work will be of interest not only to historians of slavery and France, but to scholars interested in the emergence of modern culture in the Atlantic world.

Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution

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Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution
William Beik
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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This lucid and wide-ranging survey is the first comparative study in English to explore popular uprisings in the cities of seventeenth-century France. Through close analysis of eyewitness narratives from protesters and authorities in more than fifteen cities, William Beik examines the complex social interaction between angry crowds and hard-pressed authorities. He adds a completely new chapter to the history of the crowd and traces the difficult and fragile connections between elite and popular culture in early modern France.

The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

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An Astounding Resource

The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)
Dominique Godineau
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0520067185

Book Description

During the French Revolution, hundreds of domestic and working-class women of Paris were interrogated, examined, accused, denounced, arrested, and imprisoned for their rebellious and often hostile behavior. Here, for the first time in English translation, Dominique Godineau offers an illuminating account of these female revolutionaries. As nurturing and tender as they are belligerent and contentious, these are not singular female heroines but the collective common women who struggled for bare subsistence by working in factories, in shops, on the streets, and on the home front while still finding time to participate in national assemblies, activist gatherings, and public demonstrations in their fight for the recognition of women as citizens within a burgeoning democracy.
Relying on exhaustive research in historical archives, police accounts, and demographic resources at specific moments of the Revolutionary period, Godineau describes the private and public lives of these women within their precise political, social, historical, and gender-specific contexts. Her insightful and engaging observations shed new light on the importance of women as instigators, activists, militants, and decisive revolutionary individuals in the crafting and rechartering of their political and social roles as female citizens within the New Republic.

Customer Reviews:

An Astounding Resource.......2006-09-15

For anyone researching the French Revolution this book would be an invaluable resource. Quotes, statistics and geographical interpretation of the riots, all are included in the realistic, sometimes tantalizing look at the struggles of Parisian women and their roles in the French Revolution. Not just a fleshed out version of a history texts after-thought, as happens so many times with books about the women or minorities of history - this book gives us the real forces behind some of the major events of the revolution - forces that include the demands of disenfranchised women eager to take part in the new Sovereignty of the people.
The tons of research done by Godineau shows not only in the immense bibliography but also in the completeness of the themes discussed in the book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the French Revolution or the history of Women.

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