Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from—and contributed to—contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. This groundbreaking book offers new insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and long-standing European debates over the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
An exciting interdisciplinary study based on new literary, historical, and bibliographical evidence, this book will appeal to students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance, the Reformation, and the history of the book.
This first collection of Margaret Mead's personal correspondence creates a vivid and intimate portrait of an American icon--with a foreword by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a wide variety of works including poems, plays, letters and treatises of natural philosophy, but her significance as a political writer has only recently been recognised. This major contribution to the series of Cambridge Texts includes the first ever modern edition of her Divers Orations on English social and political life, together with a new student-friendly rendition of her imaginary voyage, A New World called the Blazing World. Susan James explains the allusions made in this classic text, and directs readers to the many intellectual debates with which Cavendish engages. Together these two works reveal the character and scope of Margaret Cavendish's political thought. She emerges as a singular and probing writer, who simultaneously upholds a conservative social and political order and destabilises it through her critical and unresolved observations about natural philosophy, scientific institutions, religion, and the relations between men and women.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This book presents selections from a little-known body of Renaissance Latin literature, translated into English for the first time, by Italian, Byzantine Greek and French humanist scholars from the period 1397-1482, spanning the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. They illustrate contemporary ideas about the Ottoman Empire, its relationship to Christian Europe and the nature of crusade and crusading, and fall into two categories: first, exhortations, letters and orations which call attention to the threat posed to Europe by the Ottoman Turks and appeal for a new crusade against them; and second, historiography on the earlier European crusades and on contemporary campaigns against the Turks.Written by educated politicians, diplomats, courtiers and scholars, these texts reveal both significant continuities with and interesting departures from earlier crusade writing. 15th-century humanists tended to describe crusade according to ancient rhetorical categories such as the secular glory (honor) and strategic advantage (utilitas) of the enterprise; they also defined it as a campaign to defend Europe - an entity whose political and cultural identity was itself in process of redefinition - against external aggression, rather than as a spiritual campaign of holy war or recuperatio. Accordingly, humanist images of the Muslim enemy also developed in new directions. Scholars portrayed the Ottomans not only as religious infidels, but also as barbarian enemies of classical learning and culture, and as masters of a formidable political and military system that seriously challenged European sovereignty. They also tended to apply these interpretations to the history of the earlier crusades, as well, resulting in some original (sometimes highly creative) re-readings of the medieval conquest and loss of the Holy Land.This literature circulated widely among educated readers and much was published by early printers. Very few of these texts are available in modern editions, however, and even fewer have ever been translated into modern languages.
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