PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF IDEAS: VOLUMES 1-6
A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
2023 AAP PROSE AWARDS WINNER: BEST HUMANITIES REFERENCE WORK

The Renaissance is famous as a period of intellectual and cultural flourishing associated with the rebirth of antiquity. It is now recognized, however, that there was considerable continuity with the preceding medieval centuries. While much that was new about the Renaissance derived from the recovery, restoration, and revival of ancient ideas and culture, the process of renewal took place against the backdrop of intellectual and cultural structures inherited from the Middle Ages. This volume of A Cultural History of Ideas explores the ways in which distinctively Renaissance ideas and a distinctively Renaissance culture emerged from the complex interaction of ancient and medieval influences.

The emphasis is on the interplay between culture and ideas, observed at close quarters through studies of scholars, physicians, botanists, and scientists; popes, cardinals, and bishops; Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and heretics; missionaries and Mughal administrators; artists, craftsmen, merchants, and butchers. Contributors to the volume look not only at philosophical, scientific, medical, pharmacological, astronomical, astrological, and cosmological treatises, but also at gardens, botanical collections and drawings, woodcuts, broadsides, frontispieces, peace treaties, and commercial contracts.

The 6-volume set A Cultural History of Ideas is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available in print for individuals or for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com. Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.