Within the Italian city states of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a relatively high degree of mutual tolerance and tranquility existed between the enlightened Christian majority and the small Jewish minority. With the prevalence of favorable political, social, and economic circumstances for Jewish life in Italy, a considerable number of Jews participated freely in Renaissance culture while upholding an intense awareness of their own particular identity. This work is a study of the life and thought of one such Jew, Abraham b. Mordecai Farissol (1452-ca. 1528). While born in Avignon, Farissol spent most of his life in Italy close to the cultural centers of Renaissance society, primarily in Ferrara, but also in Mantua, Florence, and other Italian cities. As scribe, educator, cantor, communal leader, polemicist, Biblical exegete, and geographer, Farissol developed variegated interests and associations which provide exciting vantage points from which to view his cultural and social world. As one of the first comprehensive studies of any Italian Jewish figure of the period, this book represents an important contribution to an understanding of Jewish society and culture. But the significance of this study of Farissol's life extends beyond what can be learned about the man and his immediate community of co-religionists. Utilizing the life and thought of one person, it explores and explicates the dialogue between Judaism and the culture of the Italian Renaissance. Despite its intrinsic interest, Jewish intellectual history in the Renaissance has remained an underdeveloped field. Many sources still remain unexamined; monographs on specific themes and figures have yet to be written. David Ruderman's study breaks new ground by making use of extensive, yet previously unpublished sources on Farissol and his society and by integrating them into the broader context of Jewish and Renaissance culture. The work is of particular interest to historians of the Jews and of Renaissance Italy. It also offers the general reader an excellent case study of the symbiotic relationship between Western culture and its Jewish minority in one of the most fertile periods of European civilization. In dramatic fashion it illustrates how Jews not only survived but creatively flourished in a pluralistic setting by appropriating from the outside new forms and ideas which they integrated into their own vital cultural experience.

Students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to go beyond the standard names and subjects will find in this text abundant information on the lives, customs, beliefs, and practices of those who lived during this exciting time period. The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopedia engages all of the Italian peninsula from the Black Death (1347–1352) to 1600. Unlike other encyclopedic works about the Renaissance era, this book deals exclusively with Italy, revealing the ways common Italian people lived and experienced the events and technological developments that marked the Renaissance era. The coverage specifically spotlights marginal or traditionally marginalized groups, including women, homosexuals, Jews, the elderly, and foreign communities in Italian cities. The entries in this two-volume set are organized into 10 sections of 25 alphabetically listed entries each. Among the broad sections are art, fashion, family and gender, food and drink, housing and community, politics, recreation and social customs, and war. The "See Also" sources for each article are listed by section for easy reference, a feature that students and researchers will greatly appreciate. The extensive collection of contemporary documents include selections from a diary, letters, a travel journal, a merchant's inventory, Inquisition testimony, a metallurgical handbook, and text by an artist that describes what the author feels constitutes great work. Each of the primary source documents accompanies a specific article and provides an added dimension and degree of insight to the material.

This volume brings together some of the most exciting renaissance scholars to suggest new ways of thinking about the period and to set a new series of agendas for Renaissance scholarship. Overturns the idea that it was a period of European cultural triumph and highlights the negative as well as the positive. Looks at the Renaissance from a world, as opposed to just European, perspective. Views the Renaissance from perspectives other than just the cultural elite. Gender, sex, violence, and cultural history are integrated into the analysis.

From Seville in 1492 to Kiev in 1967, Allan Levine’s dazzling new history brings to life ten defining points in the Jewish Diaspora in a series of moment-in-time portraits of individual people, their families and communities, and the cities they inhabited. The cities are all famous cosmopolitan centres at significant moments in history. In addition to Seville, where the story begins with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and Kiev, where the “refusenik” Jews fought for the right to emigrate to Israel, there is Venice in 1516 and the establishment of the first “ghetto,” Constantinople in 1666 and the Jewish physicians to the sultans, Amsterdam in 1700 and the glorious rebirth of Sephardic Jewish culture, Vienna in 1730 and the immensely powerful yet vulnerable court Jews, St Petersburg in 1881 and the pogroms inflicted on the shtetls, Paris in 1895 and the Dreyfus scandal, New York in 1913 and the tenement life and culture of the Lower East Side, and the dreadful plight of the Vilna ghetto in 1944. But the focus of each chapter is the personal and public lives of individuals. A few, such as merchant and poet Don Isaac Abravanel, soldier Alfred Dreyfus, and writer and editor Abraham Cahan, are well known; others, like doctor Moses Hamon, financier Samuel Oppenheimer, and underground resistance leader Abba Kovner, are now unjustly forgotten. Their successes or failures – as teachers, rabbis, merchants, writers, soldiers, and physicians – add a colourful and human dimension to the sprawling saga of the Diaspora.

Renaissance Europe appears in all its splendor, fascinating diversity, and restless dynamism in this revised edition of a favorite textbook. De Lamar Jensen has incorporated the best of contemporary scholarship, making Renaissance Europe a reliable, highly readable, comprehensive, and challenging introduction to all aspects of early modern Europe. Politics, economic development, social life, art, literature and thought all receive careful attention. Geographically, too, the author's scope is admirably wide, encompassing not just Italy but all of Europe, Iberia and England to Poland-Lithuania and Hungary. A generous selection of maps, photographs genealogical charts and bibliographical essay enhance the book's usefulness to students and teachers. -- Back cover.