The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo Book pdf

Jerry Brotton is a British historian. He is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, a television and radio presenter and a curator.
Brotton writes about literature, history, material culture, trade, and east-west relations, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He employs interdisciplinary approaches, looking at art, politics, history, travel writing and literature. His book A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Allen Lane, 2012) has been translated into twelve languages.[citation needed] It was accompanied by a three-part series on BBC Four, Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession.[1] His The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection (Macmillan, 2006) was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize (now the Baillie Gifford Prize). It wryly proposes that the dispersal of Charles I's art collection in 1649 was a democratic move, one that merits imitation in the contemporary world. His 2016 book This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (London: Allen Lane, 2016) was serialised on BBC Radio 4 and won the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown (2017).

The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo book pdf by Jerry Brotton

The Renaissance range in changes at a breathtaking pace, changes that shape the world to this day. Now Jerry Brotton deftly captures this remarkable age, in a book that places Europe's great flowering in a revealing global context. It was Europe's contact with the outside world, Brotton argues, especially with the rich and cultivated East, that made the Renaissance what it was. Indeed, Europeans saw themselves through the mirror of the East--it was during this age, for instance, that they first spoke of themselves as "Europeans." Here is cultural history of the best kind, as Brotton muses on the meanings of Holbein's painting "The Ambassadors"--which is virtually a catalog of the international influences on Europe--or on the Arabic influence in the burgeoning sciences of astronomy and geography. This global approach offers revealing new insights into such men as Dante and Leonardo da Vinci and highlights the international influences behind Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Along with fresh and original discussions of well-known figures from Copernicus to Dürer to Shakespeare, Brotton offers a far-reaching exploration that looks at paintings and technology, patterns of trade and the printed page, as he illuminates the overarching themes that defined the age. From architecture to medicine, from humorists to explorers, the teeming world of the Renaissance comes to life in this thoughtful, insightful, and beautifully written book, which offers us a timely perspective on the Renaissance as a moment of global inclusiveness that still has much to teach us today.