Morris Bishop Livres

Petrarch is an ideal subject for biography, and he has found the perfect biographer in Morris Bishop, whose scholarship is both authoritative and unobtrusive, and whose urbane prose sparkles with color and wit. Yet this is more than a biography, for Petrarch's story is told against the background of a pageant of daily life in the later Middle Ages--sometimes brilliant, sometimes squalid, sometimes merely human. Many selections from Petrarch's poems and prose writings, in Mr. Bishop's deft translation, depict Petrarch's many-sided character in his own words, while twelve drawings by Alison Mason Kingsbury provide a rich embellishment for this entertaining book.

The book offers a comprehensive narrative of a thousand years of European history, spanning from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. It explores key developments such as the rise of kings and emperors, the emergence of knighthood, the strengthening of the Church, and the growth of the middle class. Morris Bishop's engaging writing style combines scholarly insight with vivid storytelling, making this work accessible and enjoyable for both academics and general readers interested in the Middle Ages.

Murders plague a university library—and only an intrepid book cataloger can solve them. For the staff of the library at the center of The Widening Stain, it’s easy enough to dismiss the death of a woman who fell from a rolling ladder as nothing more than an unfortunate accident. It’s more difficult, however, to explain away the strangled corpse of a man found inside a locked room, surrounded by rare and obscure erotica. And that’s not all—a valuable manuscript has vanished from the stacks, which means that both a killer and a thief are loose in the facility’s hallowed halls. It’s up to chief cataloger Gilda Gorham to solve the crimes but, unless she’s careful, the next death in the library might just be her own... A humorous and literary Golden Age mystery, The Widening Stain is adorned with as many playful limericks as it is with bibliographic details. The book, which offers a satirical glimpse of academic life at an institution strongly resembling Cornell University, is one of the most beloved bibliomysteries (mysteries involving books) of all time.