Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance pdf

Lisa Anne Bronowski (Jardine) was a British historian of the early modern period. From 1990 to 2011 she was Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London. Since 2008 she was Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)] She was a Member of Council of the Royal Institution, but resigned from that post in September 2009. On 1 September 2012, She relocated with her research centre and its staff to University College London (UCL) to become the first director of its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities.

Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance pdf by Lisa Jardine

In this provocative and wholly absorbing work, Lisa Jardine offers a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth — that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought. As Jardine boldly states, "The seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance." While Europe's royalty and merchants competed with each other to acquire works of art, vicious commercial battles were being fought over who should control the centers for trade around the globe. Jardine encompasses Renaissance culture from its western borders in Christendom to its eastern reaches in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, bringing this opulent epoch to life in all its material splendor and competitive acquisitiveness. "A savvy, street-smart history of the Renaissance."—Dan Cryer, Newsday "Jardine's lively book is specific and down-to-earth. A particularly fascinating section recalls how books suddenly ceased to be principally collector's items or aids to scholars and became the sixteenth century's Internet, dispensing fact and fancy to high and low.