Download or read book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance written by Ioan P. Culianu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987-11-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today. Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent. In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing. Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book Eros Magic the Murder of Professor Culianu written by Ted Anton and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anton (writing, DePaul U.) synthesizes the research he has done since the beginning on the still-unsolved May 1991 murder of Chicago Divinity School professor Ioan Culianu, a protege of pioneering mythologist Mircea Eliade. Culianu had been taunting the communist government of his native Romania, and Anton suggests the murder was political. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Renaissance Characters written by Eugenio Garin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-05-09 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compared to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance is brief—little more than two centuries, extending roughly from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century—and largely confined to a few Italian city states. Nevertheless, the epoch marked a great cultural shift in sensibilities, the dawn of a new age in which classical Greek and Roman values were "reborn" and human values in all fields, from the arts to civic life, were reaffirmed. With this volume, Eugenio Garin, a leading Renaissance scholar, has gathered the work of an international team of scholars into an accessible account of the people who animated this decisive moment in the genesis of the modern mind. We are offered a broad spectrum of figures, major and minor, as they lived their lives: the prince and the military commander, the cardinal and the courtier, the artist and the philosopher, the merchant and the banker, the voyager, and women of all classes. With its concentration on the concrete, the specific, even the anecdotal, the volume offers a wealth of new perspectives and ideas for study.
Download or read book The Boundaries of Eros written by Guido Ruggiero and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the records of several Venetian courts that dealt with sex crimes, Ruggiero traces the evolution of both licit and illicit sexuality during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, providing insight into Venetian society and, ultimately, the Renaissance itself.
Download or read book Man and Nature in the Renaissance written by Allen G. Debus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1978-10-31 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to science and medicine during the earlier phrases of the scientific revolution.
Download or read book A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance written by Guido Ruggiero and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together some of the most exciting renaissance scholars to suggest new ways of thinking about the period and to set a new series of agendas for Renaissance scholarship. Overturns the idea that it was a period of European cultural triumph and highlights the negative as well as the positive. Looks at the Renaissance from a world, as opposed to just European, perspective. Views the Renaissance from perspectives other than just the cultural elite. Gender, sex, violence, and cultural history are integrated into the analysis.
Download or read book Rereading Ancient Philosophy written by Verity Harte and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revisits central texts and themes in ancient philosophy in order to throw fresh light on some familiar passages and debates.
Download or read book The True History of Merlin the Magician written by Anne Lawrence-Mathers and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A medieval historian examines what we really know about the man who was “Merlin the Magician” and his impact on Britain. Merlin has remained an enthralling and curious individual since he was first introduced in the twelfth century in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. But although the Merlin of literature and Arthurian myth is well known, his “historical” figure and his relation to medieval magic are less familiar. In this book Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores just who he was and what he has meant to Britain. The historical Merlin was no rough magician: he was a learned figure from the cutting edge of medieval science and adept in astrology, cosmology, prophecy, and natural magic, as well as being a seer and a proto-alchemist. His powers were convincingly real—and useful, for they helped to add credibility to the “long-lost” history of Britain which first revealed them to a European public. Merlin’s prophecies reassuringly foretold Britain’s path, establishing an ancient ancestral line and linking biblical prophecy with more recent times. Merlin helped to put British history into world history. Lawrence-Mathers also explores the meaning of Merlin’s magic across the centuries, arguing that he embodied ancient Christian and pagan magical traditions, recreated for a medieval court and shaped to fit a new moral framework. Linking Merlin’s reality and power with the culture of the Middle Ages, this remarkable book reveals the true impact of the most famous magician of all time. “The story of how the image of Merlin as political prophet, magician and half-demon evolved in the Middle Ages is as fascinating as any romance.”—Euan Cameron
Download or read book The Cabinet of Eros written by Stephen John Campbell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Renaissance studiolo was a space devoted in theory to private reading. The most famous studiolo of all was that of Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua. This work explores the function of the mythological image within a Renaissance culture of collectors.
Download or read book Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance written by Paul Oskar Kristeller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1964 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Appendix - "The Medieval Antecendents of Renaissance Humanism"__
Download or read book Ancient Greek Love Magic written by Christopher A. FARAONE and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Greeks commonly resorted to magic spells to attract and keep lovers. Surveying and analyzing various texts and artifacts, the author reveals that gender is the crucial factor in understanding love spells.
Download or read book Hidden Intercourse written by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-12-31 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Western esotericism is rich in references to the domains of eros and sexuality, but this connection has never been explored in detail from a critical scholarly perspective. Bringing together an impressive array of top-level specialists, this volume reveals the outlines of a largely unknown history spanning more than twenty centuries.
Download or read book Ficino and Fantasy written by Marieke J.E. van den Doel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) influence the art of his time? This book starts with an exploration of Ficino’s views on the imagination and discusses whether, how and why these ideas may have been received in Italian Renaissance works of art.
Download or read book Renaissance Eroticism at the Dawn written by Philip J. Regal and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nudity in religious art had been virtually all shameful for the first 1400 years of Christianity-sinners burning in Hell, Adam and Eve after The Fall. But in the early Italian Renaissance, the nude human body can be found with dignity and beauty even in religious art. How were centuries of religious beliefs and traditions overcome? Renaissance Eroticism at the Dawn explores this question. It focuses on a detailed study of the first freestanding nude statue since antiquity, Donatello's puzzling bronze "David." In the popular mind this statue has long been simply the Biblical David standing on the head of Goliath, but experts have found it to be in fact quite mysterious in its details and it has never made sense simply as the slaying of Goliath. It is argued here however that mysterious details of the statue do make good sense in a historical intellectual context that has now become better understood. The general context was an effort in Italian Christian intellectual circles (loosely, the Humanist Zeitgeist) to recover a pure spirituality, unadulterated by the dogmas and politics of the then oppressive Roman Church. Intellectual Christians scoured ancient philosophical, magical, and mythological texts for possible insights into universal and authentic spiritual truths that they felt had been suppressed and denied them by theocrats. Northern European Protestants had much the same complaints with Roman dogma but took their resentments in very different directions with the Reformation. Renaissance Eroticism at the Dawn examines the details of "David" in the context of modern readings of spiritual trends in 15th century Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, spiritual alchemy, mythological allegory, magic, and numerology. These were once dismissed as "esoteric" or "occult," superstitious beliefs. But scholars began to study them more seriously in recent decades-for example to better understand the roots of modern CONCEPTUAL science. These have now come to be regarded as important "proto-sciences" and "alternative spiritualities." Of course Renaissance spirituality also forms an important chapter not only for the history of science but also for the complex history of Christian thought and of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation-and indeed for the development of the modern mind. The deeper motivational question looms: What strong compulsions-what powerful human aspirations-could have led bright people to persist doggedly at such efforts, that from our contemporary perspective can seem nonsensical? A consideration of the potential "esoteric" spirituality in "David" is an opportunity to explore the personal and emotional dimensions of that remarkably rich, diverse, and historically transformative climate of questioning, investigation, and speculation in Renaissance Italy. Renaissance, Eros, Plato, Neo-Platonism, Donatello, occult, esoteric, alchemy, magic, Ficino, Florence, putti, Amor-Atys, nudity, baptism, Pagan, Christianity, history of science, sensuality, Pico de Mirandola, mythology, Reformation, Council of Trent, Council of Florence, Dante, homosexual, androgyny.
Download or read book Luxury Arts of the Renaissance written by Marina Belozerskaya and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.
Download or read book Angels in the Early Modern World written by Peter Marshall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the role of belief in the existence of angels in the early modern world.
Download or read book Morgante written by Luigi Pulci and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-22 with total page 1018 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic picaresque epic detailing the thrilling exploits of Orlando, Morgante is a tale of war and of the calamities that befall the romantic hero, his fellow knights, and their sovereign, Charlemagne. After encountering the fierce Morgante, Orlando converts the giant, who then becomes his squire and trusted companion. This annotated English translation will lead to a new appreciation of Luigi Pulci's singular epic masterpiece and contribute to a reassessment of the author's influence on modern English literature.
