Worldly Goods

Bol

In this provocative and wholly absorbing work, Lisa Jardine offers a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth - that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought. As Jardine boldly states, The seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance. While Europe's royalty and merchants competed with each other to acquire works of art, vicious commercial battles were being fought over who should control the centers for trade around the globe. Jardine encompasses Renaissance culture from its western borders in Christendom to its eastern reaches in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, bringing this opulent epoch to life in all its material splendor and competitive acquisitiveness. A savvy, street-smart history of the Renaissance. -Dan Cryer, Newsday Jardine's lively book is specific and down-to-earth. A particularly fascinating section recalls how books suddenly ceased to be principally collector's items or aids to scholars and became the sixteenth century's Internet, dispensing fact and fancy to high and low. -The New Yorker

Bol Partner

The flowering of civilization, the rebirth of classical scholarship and the serendipitous coming together of some of the greatest artists the world has ever known: this is the traditional view of the Renaissance. This work provides an interpretation of that age of European culture. In it, the author argues that while aristocrats and newly prosperous merchants commissioned works of art from the leading artists of the day, vicious commercial battles were being fought over silks and spices, and who should control international trade. As humanism and the new learning spread out of Italy across Europe, the prodigious output of the printing presses which sprang up soon dictated - by accident as much as by design - what was to become the European intellectual tradition.