A committed student of vernacular literatures alongside classical ones, Shelley matured a deeply integrated vision of European literature as a transnational conversation including the English-language tradition. This conception informs his literary and theoretical writings, his reflections about and practice of translation, and his appropriations and recreations of foreign forms and modes, such as Dante’s terza rima or Petrarch’s Trionfi. His interests focused especially on the Renaissance (in France, Italy, and Spain) and the eighteenth century and Revolutionary period (especially in France) and on figures such as Michel de Montaigne, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Madame de Staël and the members of her salon at Coppet. Shelley’s engagements with modern European literatures confirm him as a poet and thinker poised between classical and post-classical cultures, harnessing them to support his revolutionary approaches to versification and poiesis, political and philosophical reflection, and cultural-social activism, against the backdrop of an incessantly evolving modernity.

The first chapter sets out the stakes of Auerbach’s understanding of Renaissance art by beginning with “The Philology of World Literature” and ending with Henry James’ sentimental tourist in Venice. To be a sentimental tourist is to live an aesthetic life in history, and this chapter uses this point to sketch out a portrait of Auerbach’s work that emerges from a stress on Renaissance.

The relationship of Catholic hierarchies with the medium of printing has always been multifarious, and even in early modern times it was far more complex than most current studies maintain. This chapter attempts to draw a concise and unbiased picture of the papacy’s publishing and censoring practices from the 1460s to the 1630s. It starts with the arrival of the first printers in Italy on the outskirts of Rome and ends with the Galileo Galilei affair, analyzing all intervening attempts to use moveable type in support of papal policy and the development of the Index of Forbidden Books. Highlighting the interconnections between prohibition and promotion, it proposes a unified interpretation of these two lines of action rather than present them in opposition, as is often the case.

The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

This chapter surveys both the rich tradition of Renaissance botanical literature and some of the critical strategies currently developing around them: ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and critical plant studies. It focuses on the co-existence of myth and science in Renaissance botanical texts and the capacity of Renaissance literature to clarify the advantages and drawbacks of bestowing personhood on plants. Renaissance literature reveals the socio-political, intellectual, and aesthetic processes by which plants became hostage to two separate cultures: the scientific and aesthetic. The chapter also argues that a properly historicised view of Renaissance plant writing might in some respects make early modern texts more relevant to the present by reviving pre-Enlightenment worldviews and pre-Industrial notions of ecological enmeshment.

The 1870s was a critical period for the transformation of British aestheticism into a mainstream phenomenon that both commodified and parodied its avant-garde origins. This transformation unfolds through three representative controversies: the 1870 publication of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, which was savaged by Robert Buchanan in his review ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’; the appearance of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which pitted an avant-garde aesthetics against conventional art historical criticism; and the notorious libel trial of 1878, in which John Ruskin’s attack on James McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket led to a legal dispute that hinged on the definition of art itself. All three episodes reveal a doubleness at the heart of aestheticism: it is committed to both idealised abstraction and concrete embodiment. This doubleness underlies aestheticism’s status as an arcane philosophy that nonetheless manifests itself in highly recognisable and commmercialisable popular forms.

Early states converge on a similar, number-based, “algorithmic” theoretical science. In Greek mathematics we see a new science, based not on the anonymous teacher but on the named author, seeking fame. Such authors look for new, surprising results, and therefore couch them in the language of proof. The resulting body of knowledge of many surprising proofs has no precedent in previous societies. The generation of Archimedes adds considerable subtlety and brings this to the cusp of modern science. The new Greek departure intertwines with other traditions, especially in the Near East, giving rise to a number-based but also proof-based astronomy (that of Ptolemy) and to the Arabic algebra. In the Renaissance, efforts to creatively engage with this Greek legacy gave rise to the scientific revolution. The science we know is objectively valid, but also historically contingent; one of the contingencies making it possible was the new departure of Greek mathematics.

This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.

Opening with Leon Battista Alberti’s celebrated definition of painting as a reflection on the surface of the water according to the ancient myth of Narcissus, the introduction elucidates the analysis of the inset-mirror motif in Renaissance painting as a form of mise-en-abyme that was central to the conceptualisation and reception of early modern art.

Explains the emergence of industrial policy during the mercantilism of the Renaissance and later.