Renaissance and 16th Century

1st Quarterly RTT - Jan - Mar 2021



Elizabeth Tudor, The Ottomans, the Inca Civil War, Martin Luther, Ferdinand Magellan, Nicolaus Copernicus, Niccolo Machiavelli and Galileo Galillei are but a few of the people who affected the world in the 16th Century.

The most comprehensive timeline I can find is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_century

Books listed in LT tagged as 16th Century can be seen here: https://www.librarything.com/tag/16th+century

Please update the wiki with the books you read: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Reading_Through_Time_Quarterly_Theme_Rea...

Is this a quarterly theme for 2021?

>2 Familyhistorian: yes

>3 majkia: Good to know because the thread name doesn't include when it is for. Is it next quarter January - March 2021?

yeah, I mucked up the title. Jan- Mar 2021

I am planning on reading Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali. I am a little confused about the dates, this book is set during the 1500s which puts it in the Renaissance period - so I think it fits here. If not let me know and I will pick another book.

ETA: I can see that I was confused between the 16th Century and the 1600s - so yes, my book does fit the 16th Century.

I have had The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett on my shelf for a very long time, and see that it is tagged in LT for the 16th century, so it will fit.

I'm doing a complete Shakespeare reread. I just bought the Complete Arkangel Shakespeare recordings – all thirty-eight plays, and they're not really "narrations" so much as they are actual performances, with actors that include Eileen Atkins, Joseph Fiennes, John Gielgud, and numerous others. A bit pricey at $390 in new condition on Amazon, but that's discounted from a list price of $600 and comes to just about $10 a play. Since the texts are based on the Pelican Shakespeare, I got a copy of that as well since I really could use a new copy of Shakespeare anyway. (My college copy is a bit tatty after a half-century.)

I've also got Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets – had it around the house for ages now – and Vendler's probably the premiere critic in the explication de texte format. My copy, which I bought years ago on Abe, includes the CD of readings of the sonnets, which is a bit of an unusual find in the out-of-print market.

And I've got most if not all of the Norton Criticals, so I may include some readings of the Norton supplemental materials as well.

>8 CurrerBell: The CD's sound wonderful! However, I don't have a CD player (that works). They do have them on Audible at 8-10 per....so I might purchase a few that I have not yet read.

>8 CurrerBell:

The Arkangel Shakespeare recordings are awesome :)

Just to add my history 2 cents worth, we teach that the Renaissance took place roughly beginning in the 14th century (very late 1300's) and lasted through the 17th century (1600's). Those are the accepted dates for high school and college level textbooks in the US and Europe. Personally, I think the 14th century is a bit early, but that is just my take. I am bent this way because the printing press was not invented until 1440 and I know there were ways of disseminating reading materials before that, but they were time consuming and not en masse. (And the fact the artistic Renaissance, which took place first, was not so dependent upon the printing press.)

Several years ago I read The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi based on a true story of a young Jewish woman during the Italian Ren. She was the daughter of an eminent Jewish banker, the wife of the popes Jewish physician, and the lover of a Christian prince. I was curious if the author wrote something else, Well apparently she has two sequels so I bought the first The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi Been on my shelf for a while, this might be the perfect time to read it!

>11 Tess_W:

That's interesting - when I was in high school (late 90s) in Bulgaria, Renaissance started in mid 15th century - it tied with certain events on the Balkans and in regional history so they were very adamant that during the fall of Bulgaria (1393-1396), we cannot even talk about pre-Renaissance in Europe - the official synchronization line between Eastern and Western European history timelines was the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 despite it actually being a much prolonged process in the West and starting almost a century early in Italy - Ottomans ruled the East while Renaissance changed the West was the usual explanation of the time. I can see why that date can be pulled back a few decades but 14th century still sits as medieval in my mind...

I wonder how much that depends on which histories you actually read -- Renaissance is a process and not a singular event so depending on where you are, it looks differently...

>1 majkia:

I have a bookshelf and a half with books about about the long 16th century - mainly in England (Tudors...) but some others as well for context... grouping Renaissance with the century gets them all in play for this quarter no matter how you define things. I guess I need to figure out what I want to read. :) Some Shakespeare fits as well - especially the early ones.

And thinking about fiction (non-Tudor related...), I really liked Maalouf's latest book and his Leo the African is staring at me from my shelves...

>13 AnnieMod: Very interesting and I think that history is always written by perspective, at least in the frame of time. That's the hardest thing for my college students to understand, there isn't always a beginning date or an ending date. Personally, I think if I had to pick a date, it would be 1450, the date "assigned" to the printing press; at least for the northern renaissance. I'm not as well versed on the Italian Renaissance, as to dates.

I read Hamnet for Shakespeare's Children, but it also fits here. I will try to read another Renaissance book this quarter, though, if I can.

>14 Tess_W: 1450 sounds about right to me but yeah, assigning years to processes is... complicated :) Battles are easy, kings are usually easy but cultural processes...

I am in the middle of a few non-fiction Tudors books (so I think I will be here a lot this quarter...) but the one I finished first and which fits was a novel: Wolf Hall. Review here: https://www.librarything.com/work/9209435/reviews/195146887 if someone is interested (or should I post it here as well?)

Yup, took the words out of my mouth. Exactly my feelings about it, esp the 'you can see the clouds gathering over Anne' which applies actually to several people. Yet she doesnt do this like a forrshadowing, which I usually really hate, its all done just in the context of the story. And like you, I could write pages and pages about what I loved, the characters, the plot, how she plays with language and meaning in words, how she teaches us about history ....um, but I'll stop here.

>18 cindydavid4: Well, that is how you do good foreshadowing IMO - by making it a part of the story and not feeling as if it is foreshadowing (or worse: an info dump). If you do not know what is coming, you do not see anything in it - it is the story, you may even miss the appearance of certain people in the middle of Anne's court. If you do? Oh my :)

>8 CurrerBell: It finally came! The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare set. Seems to have been buried under holiday mail in one of the USPS sorting houses.

>20 CurrerBell: Congrats :) Have fun with them! :)

>19exactly; you also miss clues in Cromwells home. Took me almost the end of my first read to realize Joanne and Cromwell had an affair Another was a kicker for me, tho it happens much later. (speaking of forshadowing!)

>8 CurrerBell: I am currently working my way through the Shakespeare History plays and am enjoying them more this time around since trying to read most of them all at once. They fit so well to our own troubled political times. Now, to tie the plays down to reality, I am reading Shakespeare's English Kings which compares the events in the plays with the known details about the actual kings.

>23 M_Clark: What order are you doing them in? The order that Shakespeare wrote them (starting with 1 Henry VI)? Or the historical order of the kings (starting with 1 Henry IV (oops) Richard II ... or really even King John)?

I completed my read of The Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali. The story of about the Reconquest of Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.

>25 DeltaQueen50: I just went ahead and bought that. Thanks for the BB!

And for the quarterly challenge I am counting Monteverdi as he was born in 1567 and published his first compositions aged 15.

Shakespeare's As You Like It (Norton Critical), which with its cross-dressing theme (also covered as a subject in the supplementary materials) also satisfies the February "fashion" topic.

I'm going to give a shot next at a complete reading of the Sonnets using Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which includes the complete sonnets accompanied by a close reading of each. Vendler is possibly the greatest living literary critic in the field of close readings (and she's got an excellent collection of close readings of Emily Dickinson). My copy is in really nice condition and includes an audio CD of at least some of the sonnets. I bought it years ago on ABE and I've never gotten around to it, so I hope the CD works! This one also qualifies for the Big Fat Book challenge.

I wonder if there is a winner of a contest for how many challengers can work for one book? Probably lots, and that is one. Actually As You Like It is one of my fav of the comedies (think Much Ado About Nothing is my fave)

>28 cindydavid4: I've got a couple two-fers for March. Pirates ("privateers") are common enough in the Renaissance, which gives us Kingsley's Westward Ho!. Also, although as I recall, the pirates are a minor plot element in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, they're still there for another Shakespearean link. (I've got a nice copy of Kingsley's novel, the edition with the Wyeth illustrations.)

>29 CurrerBell: (I've got a nice copy of Kingsley's novel, the edition with the Wyeth illustrations.)

oh drool.......

April-Jun thread is up:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/330564

>30 cindydavid4: ...and I just finished Westward Ho! (with a fairly detailed post on the March topic thread).

I have finished The Queen's agent, a non-fiction book about Francis Walsingham.

>32 CurrerBell: thanks for that!

And one more non-fiction book finished: The world of Renaissance Florence. Several authors look at all aspects of life in the city, and the ones about architecture, painting and classical studies were overloaded with names.

It took me a long time but I finally finished the book for the first quarter. I read The Serpent and the Pearl which was loosely based on the life of one of the mistresses of the Borgia Pope.