Description: The essays in this volume all deal, essentially, with aspects or episodes of European history between the Renaissance and great historical and intellectual watershed which can be seen as the end of the Renaissance, the Thirty Year War. Historical periodization is notoriously dangerous and perhaps unreal. The Renaissance has been discovered before 1400 and the ideas of the sixteenth century did not all perish in the seventeenth century. They begin in Renaissance Venice and the renewal of culture at Habsburg court, and they end with the explosion of the 1620s in Europe, and the observation of the whole theatre of Renaissance man, as seen by Robert Burton from his private box in that most flourishing college in Europe, Henry VIII's foundation of Christ Church, Oxford.

Please Wait