The scientific renaissance, 1450-1630

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Nicholas Everett

"The Alphabet of Galen is a critical edition and English translation of a text describing, in alphabetical order, nearly three hundred natural products - including metals, aromatics, animal materials, and herbs - and their medicinal uses. A Latin translation of earlier Greek writings on pharmacy that have not survived, it circulated among collections of 'authorities' on medicine, including Hippocrates, Galen of Pergamun, Soranus, and Ps. Apuleius. This work presents interesting linguistic features, including otherwise unattested Greek and Latin technical terms and unique pharmacological descriptions. Nicholas Everett provides a window onto the medieval translation of ancient science and medieval conceptions of pharmacy. With a comprehensive scholarly apparatus and a contextual introduction, The Alphabet of Galen is a major resource for understanding the richness and diversity of medical history.

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Talia Schaffer

"Most critics of aestheticism focus on the Yellow Book, the glossy Victorian journal with the shocking yellow cover that counted among its contributors Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm. But one of the best-known aesthetes, Oscar Wilde, launched his own magazine, the Woman's World. The audience for Wilde's magazine reveals another side of the aesthetic movement that has been largely forgotten. Every now-canonical male aesthete once competed with what Talia Schaffer calls the female aesthetes, whose critical and popular success made them formidable contemporaries. Not only did these women make significant contributions to the development of feminist ideologies; they pioneered new literary strategies that were incorporated by their canonical successors. Schaffer analyzes writers who have never been considered together, including Lucas Malet (Mary Harrison), Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Una Ashworth Taylor, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Mary and Jane Findlater, and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie). These women used aestheticism to forge a compromise between the two models of female identity available to them--the New Woman and the Angel in the House. They developed plots, ideas, and styles that would later be adopted, parodied, or revised by canonical writers such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. They used the "pretty" language of aestheticism as a strategic cover behind which they could attempt radical experiments, many of which prefigure modernist innovations."--Pub. desc.

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Leslie B. Rout, Jr

This text presents the broad historical contours of the African experience in Spanish America, from enslavement, resistance, and rebellion to the crucial participation of Afro-Latin Americans in the wars of independence, and a region-by-region account of their varied treatment in the newly-founded republics from the 19th century to the modern era.

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Penelope Murray and T.S. Dorsch

This anthology brings together core classical texts for understanding literature. The selections from Plato illustrate the poetic philosopher's surprising exclusion of poets from his ideal republic. In his response, Poetics, Aristotle draws on the works of the great Greek playwrights to defend the value of the art. Horace's The Art of Poetry is a vivid practitioner's guide that promotes a style of poetic craftsmanship rooted in wisdom, ethical insight, and decorum. Longinus's On the Sublime explores the nature of inspiration in poetry and prose. This volume is a work of great value and interest to classicists, students, and writers.