Mary Martin McLaughlin Livres

Essential passages form the works of more than 100 fifteenth-and sixteenth-century thinkers and writers, including Erasmus, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Bodin, Dürer, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Rabelais, Leonardo, Cellini, Copernicus, Galileo, Savonarola, Luther, and Calvin. It was the age in which Europe rediscovered antiquity even as it built the foundations of the modern world; when Christendom lost its eastern empire and conquered a new world to the west; an age in which Leonardo and Michelangelo glorified the human body while Andreas Vesalius stripped bare its skeleton; an age in which a revolution in scientific knowledge coexisted with a religious inquisition and the hysterical persecution of suspected witches. The 200 years we call the Renaissance were so eventful and contradictory that one man, Erasmus of Rotterdam, could decry their tyranny, avarice and iniquity, yet proclaim the "near approach of a golden age."

In their introduction to this anthology, James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin remind us that "no area of the past is dead if we are alive to it. The variety, the complexity, the sheer humanity of the middle ages live most meaningfully in their own authentic voices." The Portable Medieval Reader assembles an entire chorus of those voices—of kings, warriors, prelates, merchants, artisans, chroniclers, and scholars—that together convey a lively, intimate impression of a world that might otherwise seem immeasurably alien. All the aspects and strata of medieval society are represented here: the life of monasteries and colleges, the codes of knigthood, the labor of peasants and the privileges of kings. There are contemporary accounts of the persecution of Jews and heretics, of the Crusades in the Holy Land, of courtly pageants, popular uprisings, and the first trade missions to Cathay. We find Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas and Abelard alongside a host of lesser-known writers, discoursing on all the arts, knowledge and speculation of their time. The result, according to the Columbia Record , is a broad and eminetly readable "cross section of source history and literature...as rich and varied as a stained glass window."

The letters of Heloise and Abelard are iconic romantic and intellectual documents, rivaling the fame of Romeo and Juliet among tragic lovers. This edition by Mart Martin McLaughlin presents their complete correspondence along with commentary for the first time.