Matteo Ricci, an early recruit of the Jesuit order, was sent to China as a missionary in 1582. If he approached the Emperor with a Bible in one hand, in the other he carried much of the accumulated technological and philosophical wisdom of the late Renaissance Europe, and thus found favour among the Mandarins, the men of learning who enjoyed high status at the Imperial Court. He learned Chinese the better to discuss with them the problems in science and technology, as also questions of religion and the hereafter. But his progress was not unopposed, for the Wise Man from the West came to be seen as an unsettling element in a too-settled society. Ricci died in 1610, disappointed in his ambition to convert the Emperor, and with him the whole of China, to Christianity. But the seed was sown and the crop, even after almost a century of atheistic communism, continues to grow in present-day China. This story of the first fully documented contact between West and East offers a fascinating insight into the history of ideas during one of the most fertile eras in European and Chinese history. Vincent Cronin has built up a reputation with his scholarly, elegantly written works of history and biography, as one of the finest popular historians of his generation. This early book proves his gift as an acutely observant and sensitive historian.
Florence in the fifteenth century was the undisputed centre of the Italian Renaissance. Its legacy is apparent today in every aspect of human endeavour. Our art and science, our learning and literature, our Christianity and our civic liberties, even our conception of what constitutes a gentleman, have all been shaped by Florentine thought and deed. In this brilliant and absorbing book Vincent Cronin brings vividly to life the people and myriad achievements of this astonishingly fruitful epoch in human history.
I wanted to find a Napoleon I could picture as a living, breathing man.' Vincent Cronin superbly realises his objective in this, probably the finest of all modern biographies of Napoleon. It is generally accepted as the author's masterpiece.
Here, from New York Times bestselling historian Vincent Cronin, is the extraordinary story of Italy - from the birth of the Roman Empire to the rise of the city-states through the Renaissance and the making of modern Italy.
THE VIEW FROM PLANET EARTH offers a fascinating, informed look at the greatest minds in history, from the classical Greeks to the present, and how their views of the cosmos have affected the evolution of our culture and values. In a lively and appealing narrative, Vincent Cronin skillfully blends history and biography to re-create the cosmology of each age through its key figures. Deftly woven throughout are the influences of astronomy and astrology, philosophy and poetry, folklore and religion. The result is a thorough analysis of mankind's preoccupation with the universe, a preoccupation that continues into our time.
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