Renaissance Books

Botany became an important science during three centuries of European empire-building, from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Ships from England, France, the Netherlands, and Spain sailed to make discoveries in the service of storing up riches. Those riches weren't just precious metals such as New World gold. They were also luxuries whose sales made fortunes for peoples and empires. So Columbus sailed west, to break into successful spice-, silk- and dye-trading China, India and the Moluccas.

Riches were also made from garden and field plants, fruits, forest products, and flowers from Africa, the Americas, and the East and West Indies. So in 1494 Columbus brought sugarcane cuttings into the West Indies. That gave Spain a start on one of the world's most successful cash crops. Great fortunes awaited those who grew and handled non-native luxuries and cash crops such as cinnamon, cloves, coffee, maize, nutmeg, pepper, Peruvian bark, rubber, sugar, tea, and tobacco. Europeans needed to know what plants looked like and where they grew, to make sure they got the correct plants.

So botany grew hand-in-hand with European voyages. For science, settlement, and trade all drove collecting, classifying, and naming plants in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, one reason behind Linnaeus classifying and naming plants was Sweden's standing in the world. His country needed to close their borders against a gold drain. Linnaeus' botanical contributions helped Swedish business and government choose which of the luxuries and cash crops grew in Sweden's climate and soils. What grew wouldn't have to be imported at high prices.

Editors Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, along with their contributing writers, offer readers a beautifully indexed, organized and written book. Their chapters give strong examples, facts, figures, historical illustrations, interpretations, and references. It's history. But what botanists, naturalists, planters, politicians, and traders did then affects us today. Seeds, plants, and cuttings were shipped, to become non-native exotics every which place but home. They were studied, pigeonholed, and named. But their natural settings and controls, such as diseases and pests, weren't. It wasn't naturally matching correct soil, correct plant, correct environment, correct controls. But, fortunately, science and its solutions have jumped way beyond the limits of COLONIAL BOTANY.

This excellent work of criticism and biography focuses on the works and the worlds of Harlem Renaissance poets Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1956), Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935, and Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966). Grimke was a published author of plays, short stories, and poetry. Dunbar-Nelson was an editor, poet, and journalist, and an important hostess to the famous and not-so-famous personalities of her time. Johnson was an educator, an assured formalist poet and a considerable social force with a memorable and important salon. Despite the minimization of Johnson's contributions in, for example the 1932 edition of "Who's Who in Colored America," in which she is listed as "housewife/writer," Dr. Hull is undaunted in her pursuit of the truthful meaning of these writers' full lives and contributions.

These writers led purposeful and productive writing and personal lives despite the fact that "at no point in their lives did anyone ever provide them with leisure to write." (p. 10). In addition, Dr. Hull asserts that black women participants' experience of the Harlem Renaissance had embedded in it the usual social tensions of caste and social class - plus the biggest handicap of all: femaleness. In most aspects, it was (not surprisingly) a man's world.

Dr. Hull has done something wonderful here. Photographs of each poet are included in the wealth of biographical material. The research is deep, as is the interpretation. Texts are excerpted. She has read letters, diaries, and a wealth of unpublished material. There is good historical and social context provided. This is a valuable, assured study. There are pages of notes, and a good index.

Definitely worth reading.

To my knowledge, this is the most rigorous biography of Columbus so far. It is basically an unknown story, since what they teach us in school is almost all of it lies and myths, for example that Queen Elizabeth sold her jewells to finance the first trip, or that everybody in Columbus' time believed the Earth was flat. By any standard, Columbus was a bit of a lunatic who probably also suffered from what todat we call bipolar disease (for example, he thought that God spoke to him directly). He seems to have been given to theatricality and emotional blackmail, but undoubtedly he was also very intelligent and a great navigator. He also had an urge for social climbing, and he longed for glory and fame more than for money. He was obsessed with finding a way to China, India and Japan by sailing West, which suited the Western European powers's commercial interests. As said before, in his time the great debate among learned people was not over the flatness or roundness of the Earth, but about its size. Columbus, by grossly underestimating it, became convinced that the voyage to Asia was within reach. Had there been no American continent, he would have been murdered or starved to death. But he was also a very courageous and brave man, and so he made possible what seemed impossible. He was a very bad politician, and his emotional diseases made him quarrel with soon former friends, which of course marred his leadership abilities. His life, very well written by Fernandez-Armesto, is a glorious, tragic and incredible epic which reads like the best adventure novels.

Good book for students to learn about Columbus and the early Portugese and Spanish explorers. The book does go a bit light on why Columbus was removed from his job a governor, but is accurate in other areas. It just dances around the facts in Columbus' later career. Good pictures and good information.

An uplifting, and emotional fulfilling experience. I have suuffered deeply from the death of my mother. These 3 audio tapes, and 2 thirty two page workbooks helped me to realize that it is o.k. for me to be happy. Spiritually uplifting, this book has helped in my finding a more loving fulfilled life. I highly recommend it to any one searching for a happier life, and for those who need help in learning the theory and practice of how to interact with other people.

Tony's story is one of amazement. Here was a guy on top of his game in the body building world,and gets smashed by a school bus,sits in a seat soaked with acid,kicked in the groin by a horse. Anybody who goes thru this would just cry. Why me why me. So did Tony. But he got it together. Didnt let it bring him down. Got new ideas and was able to conceive believe and achieve. This is a great motivational tape. Tony gets ya fired up. If your looking for inspiration,I mean true inspiration from a guy who was going for it all when fate interupted,but found the will to drive on then this is the tape for you. Tony will get you motivated. Thanks Tony. You are an inspiration.

European history, as I was taught it at school in Australia 25 years ago, was one in which Byzantium was written out. The standard historical text "Europe in Transition" by Ferguson stated:
"It is now recognised that the capture of Byzantine capital [by the Turks in 1453] did not alter the practical situation in any such drastic way. The Greek refugees came to Italy too late to do more than assist a classic revival already reaching its peak. As Voltaire remarked, the Greeks could teach the Italians nothing but Greek, and, one might add, even for that they were no longer essential." p. 407

Geanakoplos' book is indispensable in understanding the contribution of the Greeks to learning, both in their bringing manuscripts which would otherwise have been lost to Italy (& the west), and to helping the Italians understand the subtleties of Greek philosophy which had been corrupted by Arabist and mediaeval Catholic misunderstandings.

Geanakoplos explains it best in his own words:
"It was not until the Italian Renaissance that the complete range of Greek writings... came to the West... for the first time all the philosophical writings of Platonism, the remainder - much more than we realize - of Aristotle...Greek Stoicism and Epicurianism... the tragedians ... and the epic poems of Hesiod and especially Homer, as well as the great Greek historians... In rhetoric the entire Byzantine corpus was brought [to Italy]. p. 31

In his book "Leonardo da Vinci: flights of the mind" by Charles Nicholl we learn that Leonardo Da Vinci attended the lectures of John Argyropoulos. To understand who Argyropoulos was and his significance is impossible without Geanakoplos' book. Argyropoulos was the leading Byzantine expert on Greek philosophy and of Greek mechanical literature (eg the pseudo-Mechanica of Aristotle); the entire edifice of western engineering is based on the transmission of Greek manuscripts on engineering which entered Italy at this time.

It is only when it is realised that the Medici, and their sponsorship of the arts was a direct result of their encounter with the Greeks from Byzantium that the importance of this period is best appreciated. Again it is Argyropoulos who became friends with Cosimo de Medici. It was under Cosimo's patronage that Argyropoulos taught in Florence and it was Argyropoulos who Cosimo chose to be the tutor of his grandson Lorenzo de Medici, who has come to be known to us as "Lorenzo the Magnificent" and under whose reign the Renaissance bloomed in Florence.

It is only when it is realised that the Medici and their encouragement of intellect was founded on these Greek émigrés (Gemistos Plethon, Argyropoulos & others) that the contribution of Byzantine Greeks to the Italian Renaissance can ever be properly appreciated. The Greeks, rather than being irrelevant to the West were the foundation upon which was built the pursuit of knowledge which ended the closed mediaeval mindset of the west European dark ages that had prevailed until then.

This second volume of the Continental Masterpieces collection begins with the Masterpieces of Neoclassicism, then goes to Masterpieces of Romanticism, Masterpieces of Realism and Naturalism, Masterpieces of Symbolism and the Modern School.It opens with selections from the 'Pensees' of Pascal, and contains many of the great works of world literature. Racine's 'Phaedra, Rouchefoucauld's 'Maxims', Rousseau's'Confessions' works of Holderlin , Goethe, Chauteaubriand, Hugo, Leopardi, Heine, Pushkin, Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Blok, Babel, Riilke, Kafka , Proust, Brecht, Sartre,Camus, Svevo, others.
The editors tell us that this is predominantly an 'anthology of imaginative literature' and this on the grounds that it is the imaginative literature 'best defines the character of its epoch'. The editors claim imaginative writings 'lead us deeper into the meaning of a past age than other modes of writing do, because they convey its unformulated aspirations and intuitions as well as its conscious theorems and ideals, and yet being timeless have unmatched appeal to our own age."

The first, most important thing to realize about Van der Poel's book is that he is not interested in the magical parts of Agrippa's work. If you're looking for that, you simply will not find it here -- try my more recent book (shameless plug). This is not to say that Van der Poel downplays the magic, or distorts Agrippa; rather, he focuses on the large but essentially unknown corpus of Agrippan works which deal with theological, legal, and traditionally philosophical topics. Another caveat: this book will be tricky, though not impossible, for those who have no Latin.

Van der Poel is a Neo-Latin philologist, and this training allows him access to this very difficult corpus. He builds up a complex, sophisticated picture of Agrippa as an intellectual very much of his time. By thus situating Agrippa within his intellectual context, Van der Poel is able to provide coherent, effective readings of _De vanitate_ [On the vanity and uncertainty of the arts and sciences] and _De praecellentia_ [On the pre-eminence of the female sex], two rather refractory works.

In addition to his precise analyses of Agrippa's Latin, Van der Poel also carefully goes through the entirety of his large correspondence, resolving or at least clarifying a great many long-standing difficulties in Agrippa's bio-bibliography.

Perhaps most essentially, however, Van der Poel succeeds in placing Agrippa's work in the context of early sixteenth-century humanism, both at a rhetorical and a philosophical level. Those interested in these subjects will find a wealth of material here, scrupulously annotated and painstakingly analyzed. In some respects I suppose some would see this book as plodding, but it is an excellent example of a classic mode of scholarship, much maligned by people who'd rather sound clever than do the kind of hard work Van der Poel does here.

If you are serious about understanding Agrippa as an intellectual of the early sixteenth century, you need to read through this book, along with Nauert's earlier study (_Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought_, 1965). If your interest is in Agrippa as part of the skeptical and humanist movements, this book is absolutely essential. If you want the magic, look elsewhere.

One of the best fiction novels.Thrilling and intriguing from the start to the end.The violence is best captured in words.A must read for thrill seekers.