Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Utopia

by Thomas More, Clarence H. Miller, Robert Martin Adams

Revised introduction; new chronology and further reading Translated with an Introduction by Paul Turner.

The Book of the Courtier (Dover Value Editions)

The Book of the Courtier (Dover Value Editions)

by Baldassarre Castiglione, Castiglione And Simpson, Castiglione And Simpson, Baldesar; Simpson, Castiglione And Hoby

An insider's view of court life and culture during the Renaissance, The Book of the Courtier is the handiwork of a diplomat who was called upon to resolve the differences in a war of etiquette among the Italian nobility. Set in 1507, when Castiglione was an attaché to the Duke of Urbino, the book consists of a series of fictional conversations between members of the Duke's retinue, who discuss the virtues and... (more)

Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)

Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)

by Catherine Bates, Philip Sidney

To the Elizabethans, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) represented the Renaissance ideal as a man of action and a man of letters. This collection includes "Astrophil and Stella" as well as selections from "Old Arcadia".

The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (Penguin Classics)

The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (Penguin Classics)

by Thomas Nash

Written in the late sixteenth century, at the pinnacle of the English Renaissance, the rich and ingenious works of Thomas Nashe uniquely reveal the ambivant nature of the Elizabethan era. Mingling the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, they express throughout an irrepressible, inexhaustible wit and an astonishing command of language. This collection of Nashe's finest works includes "The Unfortunate... (more)

Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance

Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance

by Michael Witmore

Children had surprisingly central roles in many of the public performances of the English Renaissance, whether in entertainments--civic pageants, children's theaters, Shakespearean drama--or in more grim religious and legal settings, as when children were "possessed by demons" or testified as witnesses in witchcraft trials. Taken together, such spectacles made repeated connections between child... (more)

Locating Privacy in Tudor London

by Lena Cowen Orlin

Locating Privacy in Tudor London asks new questions about where private life was lived in the early modern period, about where evidence of it has been preserved, and about how progressive and coherent its history can be said to have been. The Renaissance and the Reformation are generally taken to have produced significant advances in individuality, subjectivity, and interiority, especially among the elite, but... (more)

Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works

by Thomas Middleton

Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) - "our other Shakespeare" - is the only other Renaissance playwright who created lasting masterpieces of both comedy and tragedy; he also wrote the greatest box-office hit of early modern London (the unique history play A Game at Chess). His range extends beyond these traditional genres to tragicomedies, masques, pageants, pamphlets, epigrams, and Biblical and political commentaries,... (more)

Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes

Edith Grossman 's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this... (more)

Labor and writing in early modern England, 1567-1667

Labor and writing in early modern England, 1567-1667

by Laurie Ellinghausen

Looking at texts by non-aristocratic authors, in this study Laurie Ellinghausen investigates the relationship between nascent early modern notions of professional authorship and the emerging idea of vocation - the sense that one's identity is bound up in one's work. Ellinghausen analyzes how the concept of labor as a calling, which was assisted by early modern experiments in democracy, print, and Protestant... (more)

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Tags: early modern prose