Providing the first in-depth examination of Pope Pius II’s development of the concept of Europe and what it meant to be ‘European’, From Christians to Europeans charts his life and work from his early years as a secretary in Northern Europe to his papacy. This volume introduces students and scholars to the concept of Europe by an important and influential early thinker. It also provides Renaissance specialists who already know him with the fullest consideration to date of how and why Pius (1405–1464) constructed the idea of a unified European culture, society, and identity. Author Nancy Bisaha shows how Pius’s years of travel, his emotional response to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the impact of classical ethnography and other works shaped this compelling vision—with close readings of his letters, orations, histories, autobiography, and other works. Europeans, as Pius boldly defined them, shared a distinct character that made them superior to the inhabitants of other continents. The reverberations of his views can still be felt today in debates about identity, ethnicity, race, and belonging in Europe and more generally. This study explores the formation of this problematic notion of privilege and separation—centuries before the modern era, where most scholars have erroneously placed its origins. From Christians to Europeans adds substantially to our understanding of the Renaissance as a critical time of European self-fashioning and the creation of a modern "Western" identity. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the formation of modern Europe, intellectual history, cultural studies, and the history of Renaissance Europe, late medieval Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.
As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works. These compositions included Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Most scholars have seen this vast literature as atypical of Renaissance humanism. Nancy Bisaha now offers an in-depth look at the body of Renaissance humanist works that focus not on classical or contemporary Italian subjects but on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, Bisaha probes these texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of self and other. Medieval concepts of Islam were generally informed and constrained by religious attitudes and rhetoric in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith. While humanist thinkers of the Renaissance did not move entirely beyond this stance, Creating East and West argues that their understanding was considerably more complex, in that it addressed secular and cultural issues, marking a watershed between the medieval and modern. Taking a close look at a number of texts, Bisaha expands current notions of Renaissance humanism and of the history of cross-cultural perceptions. Engaging both traditional methods of intellectual history and more recent methods of cross-cultural studies, she demonstrates that modern attitudes of Western societies toward other cultures emerged not during the later period of expansion and domination but rather as a defensive intellectual reaction to a sophisticated and threatening power to the East.
Providing the first in-depth examination of Pope Pius II’s development of the concept of Europe and what it meant to be ‘European’, From Christians to Europeans charts his life and work from his early years as a secretary in Northern Europe to his papacy. This volume introduces students and scholars to the concept of Europe by an important and influential early thinker. It also provides Renaissance specialists who already know him with the fullest consideration to date of how and why Pius (1405–1464) constructed the idea of a unified European culture, society, and identity. Author Nancy Bisaha shows how Pius’s years of travel, his emotional response to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the impact of classical ethnography and other works shaped this compelling vision—with close readings of his letters, orations, histories, autobiography, and other works. Europeans, as Pius boldly defined them, shared a distinct character that made them superior to the inhabitants of other continents. The reverberations of his views can still be felt today in debates about identity, ethnicity, race, and belonging in Europe and more generally. This study explores the formation of this problematic notion of privilege and separation—centuries before the modern era, where most scholars have erroneously placed its origins. From Christians to Europeans adds substantially to our understanding of the Renaissance as a critical time of European self-fashioning and the creation of a modern "Western" identity. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the formation of modern Europe, intellectual history, cultural studies, and the history of Renaissance Europe, late medieval Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.
A path-breaking work at last available in paper, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning is Nancy G. Siraisi’s examination of the intersections of medically trained authors and history from 1450 to 1650. Rather than studying medicine and history as separate traditions, Siraisi calls attention to their mutual interaction in the rapidly changing world of Renaissance erudition. With remarkably detailed scholarship, Siraisi investigates doctors’ efforts to explore the legacies handed down to them from ancient medical and anatomical writings.
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