Through its many and varied manifestations, authority has frequently played a role in the communication process in both manuscript and print. This volume explores how authority, whether religious, intellectual, political or social, has enforced the circulation of certain texts and text versions, or acted to prevent the distribution of books, pamphlets and other print matter. It also analyzes how readers, writers and printers have sometimes rebelled against the constraints and restrictions of authority, publishing controversial works anonymously or counterfeiting authoritative texts; and how the written or printed word itself has sometimes been perceived to have a kind of authority, which might have had ramifications in social, political or religious spheres. Contributors look at the experience of various European cultures-English, French, German and Italian-to allow for comparative study of a number of questions pertinent to the period. Among the issues explored are local and regional factors influencing book production; the interplay between manuscript and print culture; the slippage between authorship and authority; and the role of civic and religious authority in cultural production. Deliberately conceived to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between the history of the book, and literary and cultural history, this volume takes a pan-European perspective to explore the ways in which authority infiltrates and is in turn propagated or undermined by book culture.

Through its many and varied manifestations, authority has frequently played a role in the communication process in both manuscript and print. This volume explores how authority, whether religious, intellectual, political or social, has enforced the circulation of certain texts and text versions, or acted to prevent the distribution of books, pamphlets and other print matter. It also analyzes how readers, writers and printers have sometimes rebelled against the constraints and restrictions of authority, publishing controversial works anonymously or counterfeiting authoritative texts; and how the written or printed word itself has sometimes been perceived to have a kind of authority, which might have had ramifications in social, political or religious spheres. Contributors look at the experience of various European cultures-English, French, German and Italian-to allow for comparative study of a number of questions pertinent to the period. Among the issues explored are local and regional factors influencing book production; the interplay between manuscript and print culture; the slippage between authorship and authority; and the role of civic and religious authority in cultural production. Deliberately conceived to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between the history of the book, and literary and cultural history, this volume takes a pan-European perspective to explore the ways in which authority infiltrates and is in turn propagated or undermined by book culture.

An investigation into the various ways in which Renaissance writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Dutch Republic.

With Italy at its centre, but encompassing the whole of Renaissance Europe, this evocative history challenges some of the popularly-held views on the Renaissance period. In particular, whilst always acknowledging the brilliance and exhuberance of Renaissance culture, Robin Kirkpatrick draws equal attention to the strangeness and often unresolved tensions that lay beneath the surface of that culture.Insisting on a European rather than purely Italian viewpoint, he embraces Renaissance thinking and culture in all its diversity: from Northern thinkers such as Cusanus, Luther and Calvin, to the painting of Van der Weyden and El Greco, and the music of the Flemish musicians, Josquin des Prez and Orlando Lassus. Special attention is also paid to the unique contribution made by Margueritte of Navarre to the development of humanist culture. The book concludes with a study of Shakespeare in which his plays are viewed as a searching critique of some of the main principles of Renaissance culture.

This open university reader is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection of material from primary sources, illustrating the relationship between cultural change and religious belief in sixteenth-century Europe. It contains more than eighty extracts drawn from a variety of genres including political, religious, philosophical and legal writing, diaries, letters, plays, poems and fiction. Some have never previously been published, others have not been reprinted since their original appearance in the sixteenth century, and a number are translated into modern English for the first time. `Culture and Belief in Europe 1450 - 1600' includes writing from such renowned thinkers as Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, and Sir Thomas More, besides that of lesser-known authors. Works of literature also feature extensively, and writings from Cervantes, Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney amongst many others are all to be found here. A general introduction describes the anthology's central aim - to explore aspects of the interrelationship between the politics, religion and writing of the period. The book is divided into eight thematic sections. Spelling in the extracts has been sensitively modernized throughout, and the editors provide a headnote and appropriate explanatory annotation for each item.

Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, volume 7 (CMR 7) is a history of all the known works on relations from Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America in the period 1500-1600. Its detailed entries contain descriptions, assessments and comprehensive bibliographical details on individual works.