Hardly any other era so vividly reflects the rise of the modern European world – with all its highs and lows – as the English Renaissance. In just a short span of time, England transformed from a semi-barbaric island into the European engine of capitalism, art, and science.
Through more than 500 original texts – selected, introduced, and translated by Manfred Pfister – this volume opens up a tremendously varied panorama, spanning from Chaucer and Erasmus to Shakespeare and Milton.
Pfister presents portraits of queens who wrote poetry, rulers who believed in witchcraft, and state-sponsored pirates who brought tobacco to Europe. Theater legends like Ben Johnson and Shakespeare appear alongside brilliant poets, composers like John Dowland, inventors of the future like Thomas Moore (Utopia), and philosophers like Roger Bacon (The Progress of Science).
There are also depictions of more unusual figures: the biographer of melancholy Robert Burton, radical communists like the “Levellers,” the pioneering midwife Jane Sharp – who was the first to describe female anatomy without prejudice – and John Greene, who exposed card tricks and small-time crooks in London’s underworld.
