What does it mean to be middle aged? That youth, hope, and promise are gone? Middle age can offer an opportunity for a new beginning a renewal of the body, mind, and spirit. It's about second chances. In Middle Age Renaissance, author Doug Brooks shows how middle age can be the time to think about pursuing positive change and taking the opportunity to renew yourself for today and all of your tomorrows for yourself and those who care about you. Drawn from a host of personal experiences, Brooks provides suggestions and advice for getting that second chance. Through stories and anecdotes, Middle Age Renaissance helps you to build your body for health and self-esteem, to build your mind for wisdom and truth, and to build your spirit for love and joy. Useful and inspiring, Middle Age Renaissance helps middle-aged people understand they can't change the past, but they can work toward becoming the person they could and should be.

After 1500, as Catholic Europe fragmented into warring sects, evidence of a pagan past came newly into view, and travelers to distant places encountered deeply unfamiliar visual cultures, it became ever more pressing to distinguish between the sacred image and its opposite, the 'idol'. Historians and philosophers have long attended to Reformation charges of idolatry - the premise for image-breaking - but only very recently have scholars begun to consider the ways that the idol occasioned the making no less than the destruction. The present book focuses on how idols and ideas about them matter for the history of early modern objects produced around the globe, especially those created in the context of an exchange or confrontation between an 'us' and a 'them'. Ranging widely within the early modern period, the volume contributes to the project of globalizing the study of European art, bringing the continent's commercial, colonial, antiquarian, and religious histories into dialogue. Its studies of crosses, statues on columns, wax ex-votos, ivories, prints, maps, manuscripts, fountains, banners, and New World gold all frame Western 'art' simultaneously as an idea and as a collection of real things, arguing that it was through the idol that object-makers and writers came to terms with what it was that art should be, and do.

Starting with an essay on the Renaissance as the concluding phase of the Middle Ages and ending with appreciations of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance, this new volume by John Monfasani brings together seventeen articles that focus both on individuals, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, and Niccolò Perotti, and on large-scale movements, such as the spread of Italian humanism, Ciceronianism, Biblical criticism, and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy. In addition to entering into the persistent debate on the nature of the Renaissance, the articles in the volume also engage what of late have become controversial topics, namely, the shape and significance of Renaissance humanism and the character of the Platonic Academy in Florence.

The second half of the 19th century was a time of extensive political upheaval in central east Europe that saw the negotiation of conflicting territorial claims in the region by the Russian, Austrian and Prussian empires. The post-WW1 settlement gave rise to the formation of the independent nation states of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia and Belarus. Less well know is that this same period was also an era of keen photographic activity. During this time of empire-, state- and nation-building, cultural heritage was a potent vehicle and a provider of collective memory and identity.This innovative account analyses the relationship between politics, history, cultural heritage and photography in central east Europe between 1859 and 1945. To understand the work photographs ‘do’ in the construction of cultural heritage, the author analyses a wide range of little-known photographic archives created by contemporary professional and amateur photographers. Their work was extensively exploited in contemporary debates, appearing in albums, books, journals, exhibitions, museum exhibits, postcards and newspapers aimed at both scientific and popular and national and international publics. An extensive analysis of how photographic practices and outcomes were applied, borrowed, copied, appropriated and transmitted shows how photography was used to exert or subvert power, on the one hand, and as a tool in constructing and negotiating group identities on the other. By weaving photography and its patterns of making, dissemination and archival survival through major historical narratives, this volume reveals the centrality of photography and visual discourse at pivotal moments of modern history.

We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last book, he argues persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as undergoing several "renaissances" following the fall of Rome, over the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century. While it is indeed necessary to divide history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful continuities of human development only become clear when historians adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions—the shifts that signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next—are much rarer than we think.

“A masterful . . . intellectual and religious history of late medieval and Reformation Europe.”—Christianity Today"A learned, humane, and expressive book."—Gerald Strauss, Renaissance QuarterlyThe seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations—both Protestant and Catholic—of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society.

The story of Jason and the Argonauts is one of the most famous in Greek myth, and its development from the oldest layers of Greek mythology down to the modern age encapsulates the dramatic changes in faith, power and culture that Western civilization has seen over the past three millennia. From the Bronze Age to the Classical Age, from the medieval world to today, the Jason story has been told and retold with new stories, details and meanings. This book explores the epic history of a colorful myth and probes the most ancient origins of the quest for the Golden Fleece--a quest that takes us to the very dawn of Greek religion and its close relationship with Near Eastern peoples and cultures.

Reprint of the original. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.