In this section I try to provide, not an exhaustive bibliography (which might threaten to go on forever), but suggestions for further reading to those who may wish to pursue a given subject more deeply.
PRELUDE
This is my fourth attempt in this series to limn the influence on Western thought of the great philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle and their intellectual descendants. Some readers may wish to consult my earlier, more conventional treatments in How the Irish Saved Civilization, Chapter II (Plato and Augustine); Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Chapter V (Plato and Aristotle); and Mysteries of the Middle Ages, Chapter III (Aristotle, Abelard, and Aquinas).
INTRODUCTION
The classic study of the Sicilian uprising of 1282 is Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1958), and a wonderful read it is.
There are many English translations of the Decameron, but none of them sounds much like the original. For sheer readability, I’d recommend the Mentor paperback (1982), translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella. The translations in the text are mine, an attempt to imitate some of the conversational meanderings of Boccaccio’s prose a little more closely than what I found in other translations. I confess, however, to having borrowed Musa and Bondanella’s translation of what the abbess put on her head. Normally, she is said to have thrown on her lover’s “breeches,” their “stays hanging down”—closer to the medieval Italian. But I prefer Musa and Bondanella’s “pants,” their “suspenders dangling down”—a funnier line to our ears.
The quotation from Terry Eagleton is from his vigorous Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale, 2009), page 82.
There are many good books on the Black Death, one of the most recent and readable being John Kelly, The Great Mortality (HarperCollins, 2005). Probably the best recent account of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion and John Ball’s involvement in it is to be found in Alistair Dunn, The Great Rising of 1381: The Peasants’ Revolt and England’s Failed Revolution (Tempus, 2002). For further reading on John Wyclif and the Lollards, you might try Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History(Oxford, 1988), a highly scholarly rendering, or Hudson’s more popularly geared entry on Wycliffe (alternative spelling) in the current Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). As for Jan Hus, the only biography in English is Matthew Spinka,John Hus(Princeton, 1968). A current view is sorely needed. When it comes to Joan of Arc, the best biography, hands down, is Donald Spoto, Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (HarperCollins, 2007).
Concerning recent finds relating to the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs, David O’Connor, Abydos: Egypt’s First Pharaohs and the Cult of Osiris (Thames and Hudson, 2009), is illuminating.
The classic interpretation of the historical ramifications of Gutenberg’s invention is Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962; reissued by Routledge). For a more recent treatment, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, revised 2005). Our current unstable transition from printed books to the Internet is eloquently evoked by Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West(Harvard, 2009). A helpfully annotated listing detailing the whereabouts of surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible may be found under the Wikipedia entry for “Gutenberg Bible.” For the quotation from Sarah Bernhardt and the references to early filmmaking, see Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art (New American Library, 1957), pages 19ff. The quotation from Professor Yoffie may be found in Steve Lohr, “The Apple in His Eye,” New York Times, January 31, 2010, “Week in Review,” page 6.
I: NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
The quotation from W. H. Auden is from the opening of his For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, available in several editions.
As for biographies of Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Little, Brown, 1942), still has much to recommend it, even if Morison’s Columbus sometimes seems more a twentieth-century Harvard man who served in the U.S. Navy than a Genoese sea captain of the late fifteenth century. Corrections of tone that bring us closer to Columbus as he was are to be found in two volumes by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Columbus and the Conquest of the Impossible (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), and a more ambitious full-scale biography, Columbus (Oxford, 1992).
For more on the peoples that Columbus and later European explorers encountered, I have three recommendations: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Vintage, 2006); David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (Yale, 2008), which also discusses the European conquest of the Canary Islands; and Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press, 1973, 1997). This last (and most controversial, as may easily be deduced from its title and subtitle) is full of startling information. It was originally published as Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico, 1971).
The quotation from William McKinley is widely cited, though sometimes disputed in its particulars, and may be found in an admirable book by Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (Little, Brown, 2010).
The New Catholic Encyclopedia (Gale, 2003) contains excellent entries on such subjects as the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada, Ferdinand and Isabella, and the reigns of various popes. On the issue of when racism became a factor in Christian Europe, a recent book, The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge, 2009), edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, attempts to push the origin back into the twelfth or thirteenth century, but I do not find the authors’ few examples conclusive. To my eyes the collection tends to lack an appropriate judiciousness while exhibiting little feeling for the ages under consideration.
Christopher Hibbert has written a long series of entertaining (and accurate) narratives on historical subjects, virtually all of them concerning Britain or Italy. These include The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall, Florence: The Biography of a City, and The Borgias and Their Enemies, all available in paperback editions from various publishers.
The principal poems of Lorenzo de’ Medici are collected in The Oxford Book of Italian Verse (Oxford, 1910), where they may be compared with the Italian poetry of Petrarch and not a few others.
II: THE INVENTION OF HUMAN BEAUTY
The world is so full of beautifully produced art books, most with excellent commentaries by appropriate experts, that there is no hope of assembling a list of modest size. For my money, however, the very best commentaries in English on Renaissance art have almost invariably been written by Kenneth Clark. In this context, I would especially recommend two: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (in several editions, all out of print), which takes us from the ancient Greeks, through the Renaissance, to twentieth-century artists; and Leonardo da Vinci (in its most recent reissue from Penguin, 1989).
The fine old study Michelangelo by Howard Hibbard (Icon Editions/Westview Press, 1974) labors under an unfortunately indifferent set of black-and-white reproductions (including, however, a picture of Michelangelo’s Christ with His Cross before the fig leaf was added).
Of the many beautifully bound editions that span the whole of the Renaissance in excellent color reproductions, I found especially moving the enormous two-volume boxed edition of The Art of Florence (Artabras, 1988) by Glenn M. Andres et al., though its weight renders it scarcely movable. Other less weighty but substantial and easily obtainable volumes include The Renaissance Complete, edited by Margaret Aston (Thames & Hudson, 1996), and a three-volume series from Yale (2007)—Making Renaissance Art, Locating Renaissance Art, and Viewing Renaissance Art—a carefully constructed multiauthor project.
In recent years, the works of Caravaggio, once ignored, have been gaining immensely in reputation. A lovingly produced Italian volume, Caravaggio: la vita e l’opera by the Italian historian and art critic Mia Cinotti, was brought out by Edizioni Bolis in 1991; a newer publication, Caravaggio: The Complete Works (Taschen, 2009) by Sebastian Schutze, is so spectacular that it may bring tears to your eyes. It surely makes up for any German slurs the Italians have endured over the centuries. A leaner but almost as impressive production is Caravaggio: The Final Years (Electa Napoli, 2005), a work of many hands, available in several European languages, including English. It is the fruit of a historic exhibition in Naples, subsequently installed at the National Gallery, London. Both these books contain faithful reproductions of Caravaggio’s overwhelming masterpiece, The Seven Works of Mercy, which hangs in the Neapolitan Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia and is too complex to be reproduced adequately here. A recent biography of the painter, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (Norton, 2010) by Andrew Graham-Dixon, replete with rather good, if small-scale, reproductions, can also be highly recommended.
One non-art book bears mentioning: Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996).
III: NEW THOUGHTS FOR NEW WORLDS
For those who would learn as much as possible about Erasmus, Cornelis Augustijn’s biography, Erasmus: His Life, Work, and Influence (Toronto, 1991), will prove indispensable. For those who take a less systematic approach, The Erasmus Reader (Toronto, 1990), edited by Erika Rummel, makes a fine beginning, as does the introduction to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (Penguin, revised 1993).
When it comes to Luther’s life, there is an embarrassment of riches. The standard biography is probably Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (Yale, 1989), though I prefer many of the insights in Richard Marius, Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (Harvard, 1999), a sort of reply to Oberman, as may be gleaned from the subtitles. There is also a splendid short and sympathetic biography by Martin Marty, Martin Luther (Viking Penguin, 2004), that ends with an excellent bibliographical note. As for Luther’s voluminous writings, there is the astonishing fifty-five-volume American edition of Luther’s Works on CD-ROM, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Fortress and Concordia, 2001). Most readers will be grateful for the somewhat more compact Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (2nd edition, with CD-ROM, Fortress, 2005), edited by Timothy F. Lull.
IV: REFORMATION!
In addition to the biographies and writings of Luther, there looms the larger subject of the Reformation itself, as well as the considerable cavalcade of reformers riding out singly and in groups across the European continent over the better part of two centuries. No one work can hope to contain all this—except for one that succeeds as well as anyone might hope: Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking Penguin, 2003). Before such an achievement—at slightly less than 800 pages—we can only stand in awe. MacCulloch’s more recent work, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking Penguin, 2009), taking in the whole of Christian history and weighing in at 1,161 pages, is also an amazing triumph.
A more simply focused account, limited to the relationship between churches and state within Germany and of considerable merit, is Thomas A. Brady Jr., German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge, 2009). A fine study that limits its focus to publishing is Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (Verso, 1976).
INTERMISSION
Is religion for or against violence? This enormous question, which I despair of answering, is given opposing answers in two engrossing books, John Teehan, In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford, 2009).
The portraits in this section come from several countries and represent many styles, the purpose being to give the reader a feeling, as tangible as possible, for people of this period, whether high or low. Two picture books that can extend this feeling even further, both published in 2011, are Renaissance People: Lives That Shaped the Modern Age (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) and The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
V: PROTESTANT PICTURES
In this chapter we encounter seven or so major figures, each one eminently worthy of further study.
Albrecht Dürer: A fine collection of The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, edited by Willi Kurth, is available from Dover. Many of Dürer’s paintings, as well as works of other German artists, are reproduced (in black and white) in a fascinating study by Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993). The quotation from Paul Tillich about Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil is found on page 161 of his The Courage to Be (Yale, 1952).
Thomas More: Though there are a number of good biographies of More, my choice falls to the sensible and moderate Peter Ackroyd (Anchor, 1999). Utopia is available in several editions. There’s a superbly evocative new novel by Jim Crace, Harvest (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2013), describing the unjust enclosure of English farmlands against the peasants—a matter of grave concern to More. This massive injustice, eventually carried out against peasants in many European countries, continues to this day, now being perpetrated by Western and Middle Eastern capitalists against poor people in many third-world countries. See Michael Kugelman, “The Global Farmland Rush,” The New York Times, February 6, 2013.
William Tyndale: The heroic translator is vividly placed in context by Benson Bobrick in Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired (Simon & Schuster, 2001). Almost set against this view is the decidedly less heroic but pointed treatment of the Protestant translators to be found in James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Harvard, 2007). Tyndale’s own unadulterated voice is to be found in Tyndale’s New Testament (Yale, 1989, 1995) and in his The Obedience of a Christian Man (Penguin, 2000).
Ignatius Loyola: The biography I refer to in the text is W. W. Meissner, Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (Yale, 1992). Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises are available in several English editions and many languages.
François Rabelais: In addition to the considerable variety of editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel offered in both the original texts and translations into modern French, there is an exhaustive new English translation of both books (and their sequels) in a single hefty volume by M. A. Screech (Penguin, 2006). A fascinating critical study, Rabelais and His World by the great and controversial Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, is available from Indiana University Press. It links Rabelais to the larger carnivalesque culture of late medieval Europe. The translations from Rabelais’s works are mine.
Pieter Bruegel: The literature on Bruegel has grown to daunting proportions. A good place to begin is the selective (!) bibliography that concludes Wilfried Seipel, ed., Pieter Bruegel the Elder at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Skira Editore, Milan, 2007).
VI: CHRISTIAN VS. CHRISTIAN
For this chapter I refer the reader to MacCulloch’s The Reformation (listed above). Another delicious source is Robert J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court (Yale, 2008). (As the reader may have noted, Yale has one of the most admirable publishing programs in the world.)
On the subject of Calvin, there is a brilliant new biography by Bruce Gordon (Yale, 2009). Marilynne Robinson’s essay, “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism,” is found in her collection When I Was a Child I Read Books(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). Another compelling collection by Robinson is The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Picador, 1998, 2005).
VII: HUMAN LOVE
Shakespeare has been well served by a variety of contemporary authors (e.g., Peter Ackroyd, Jonathan Bate, Stephen Greenblatt), most notably, in my reckoning, by James S. Shapiro in 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (HarperCollins, 2009). The passage from John Donne comes from his Meditation XVII. There is a good new biography, John Donne: The Reformed Soul by John Stubbs (Norton, 2007). Kenneth Clark long ago wrote the fine Introduction to Rembrandt (John Murray, 1978). Simon Schama’s massive appreciation, Rembrandt’s Eyes (Knopf, 1999), offers the most faithful reproductions of Rembrandt’s art, as well as the most complete collection, to be found anywhere.
POSTLUDE
All of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings are in the process of being published by Fortress. His most famous work, usually referred to as The Cost of Discipleship, has been published by Fortress in a critical edition under its original title, Discipleship (2000). The same publisher offers the most praised biography: Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Man for His Time (2000).
For John XXIII I am bold enough to recommend my own Pope John XXIII (Penguin, revised 2008).
Some of the information about Muriel Moore is taken from the engaging sermon preached at her requiem eucharist by the Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell, now pastor of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, New York City.