English Renaissance

Mary Howard is the dutiful daughter of the infamous Duke of Norfolk. Protected by her prestigious family and wealth, she is swept up in Anne Boleyn’s glittering court. Charmed by talented poets and flirtatious knights, it’s easy to forget that someone is watching her every move. The court grows wilder as the world changes around them. Everything seems possible, even marrying for love. All Mary can think of is her poetry, but then she gets involved in her uncle’s affairs. Soon her world of privilege and safety are torn away. But she’s not a Howard girl for nothing.

After the brutal murder of her grandfather, feisty Stephanie Merlin, a television journalist, hunts down his unknown killer. Before she knows it, Stephanie finds herself amid the glittering world of the de Veigas, a family whose fabulous fortune from tin, banking and pharmaceuticals affords them all the power, privilege and pleasure money can buy. But the gilded facade conceals a web of deception that spans decades and stretches across three continents. As Stephanie plunges further into this corrupt paradise, she discovers a plan with horrifying implications. Aboard the de Veiga's super-...

Many of the artists that we encounter are completely unaware of the mathematics that bubble beneath their craft, while some consciously use it for inspiration. Our instincts might tell us that these two subjects are incompatible forces with nothing in common – mathematics being the realm of precise logic and art being the realm of emotion and aesthetics – but what if we’re wrong? Blueprints asks us to consider that mathematics and art may not be polar opposites after all.

Anne, Duchess of Brittany, is the love of King Louis XII of France's life. Too bad he's already married. While his annulment proceedings create Europe's most sensational scandal of 1498, Anne returns to Brittany to take back control of her duchy that her late husband, Charles VIII, King of France, had wrested from her. At age 21, Anne is sovereign ruler of Brittany as well as Europe's most wealthy widow. But can she maintain Brittany's independence from France if she accepts Louis's offer to make her Queen of France once more?

Henry IV is not famous except for the plays that bear his name: He is not even a "much-maligned" king. He is normally overshadowed by his far more famous son, Henry V, despite his many achievements. Shakespeare is partly to blame for Henry's diminution and his son's exaggerated stature but not completely; we just don't know what to make of a man who took the throne from the rightful king.

The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montana's vast emptiness. Winter in the Blood is an evocative and unforgettable work of literature that will continue to move and inspire anyone who encounters it.

In the best-selling Warriors of God and Dogs of God, James Reston Jr. limned two epochal conflicts between Islam and Christendom. Here he examines the ultimate battle in that centuries-long war, which found Europe at its most vulnerable and Islam on the attack. This drama was propelled by two astonishing young sovereigns: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Turkish sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Though they represented two colliding worlds, they were remarkably similar.

Master Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer Benvenuto Cellini is best remembered for his magnificent autobiography. In this work, which was actually begun in 1558 but not published until 1730, Cellini beautifully chronicles his flamboyant times. He tells of his adventures in Italy and France, and his relations with popes, kings, and fellow artists.

And you think you have problems resisting those Christmas cookies! It is Christmas Eve in Provence. The date is seventeen hundred and something and Father Balagère is getting ready to say Midnight Mass at Trinquelage castle. The tradition calls for the service to be three Low Masses, that is, Masses where the responses are spoken by the acolyte, not sung by the choir.The celebrants and the congregation are required to be fasting, and everyone is hungry. Meanwhile, in the kitchens the feast is being prepared for after the service, and all the delicious smells are wafting throughout the ...

A captivating true story that chronicles the exploits of Sir Francis Walsingham - the first great English spymaster and the man who saved Elizabeth's regime and the country's independence. Elizabeth I came to the throne at a time of insecurity and unrest. Rivals threatened her reign; England was a Protestant island, isolated in a sea of Catholic countries. Spain plotted an invasion, but Elizabeth's Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, was prepared to do whatever it took to protect her. He ran a network of agents in England and Europe who provided him with information about invasions or assassination plots.

Published to great acclaim in 1873, Walter Pater’s compendium of idiosyncratic, impressionistic essays on the Renaissance gained him a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. Oscar Wilde called it the “holy writ of beauty.” It was Pater’s cry of “art for art’s sake” that became the manifesto for the aesthetic movement. He believed that art should be sensual and that beauty should rank as the highest ideal. Marked by elegant fluency, Pater’s essays discuss Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists who, for him, embodied the spirit of the Renaissance.

Rumors of insurrection in Renaissance Pisa spur Florentine authorities to send young lawyer Nico Argenti to investigate. He and his team uncover more than expected: smuggling, abduction, and murder. Renaissance Italy 1465: After six decades of domination by Florence, agitators in Pisa are taking action. They remember the past when Pisa was an independent State and they are impatient to regain that freedom. Rumors of an impending insurrection reach officials in Florence who dispatch Nico Argenti and his team to find and stop the troublemakers before they resort to violence. Nico and his ...

During the sweltering Roman summer of 1492, Rodrigo Borgia has risen to power as pope. Rodrigo’s eldest son Cesare, forced to follow his father into the church and newly made the Archbishop of Valencia, chafes at his ecclesiastical role and fumes with jealousy and resentment at the way that his foolish brother has been chosen for the military greatness he desired. Maddalena Moretti comes from the countryside, where she has seen how the whims of powerful men wreak havoc on the lives of ordinary people. But now, employed as a servant in the Vatican Palace, she cannot help but be entranced by Cesare Borgia.

What was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time? In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a visitor to late 16th-century England would ask.

Following the fall of Rome in 476 CE, the entire dynamic of Europe underwent a complete shift in power and culture. The Dark Ages was an interesting period of about six centuries, and during it, Europe was still trying to figure out what it was and how it would survive the chaos that followed the fall of Rome.

In the 20th century, Romanticism, a 19th century malignant mutation of Renaissance humanism and its emphasis on the individual, provoked the counter-movements of Fascism,Communism, and Nazism. But, contrary to the observations of Jakob Burckhardt in his masterpiece, "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy" (1860, 1878), it was the Renaissance that gave birth to the aesthetics of totalitarianism, to the personality cult, to the obsession with "men of action", to the cultivation of verbal propaganda and indoctrination (rhetoric) as means of influencing both the masses and decision-...

Ay Yi Yai Yi! It’s halftime, America! Welcome to the intermission of empire, featuring interpretive dances by decaying institutions choreographed by lobbyists holding MBAs in short-termism. Like the infamous Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy, today's techno-totems—quantum AI supremacy, sovereign digital currencies, and China's Belt-and-Data colonialism—have crash-landed onto our meticulously manicured lawns. Initially celebrated as symbols of progress, these shiny artifacts now function as civilization’s Rorschach tests, exposing strategic confusion and institutional amnesia as ...

Born into the English Wars of the Roses, educated in the European Renaissance, enthralled by the Age of Exploration and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, Thomas More is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Thomas More: A Life is the definitive biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure. Overturning many received interpretations of the sixteenth century, Joanne Paul shows Thomas More to have been an intellectual and political giant of his age, central to the making of modern Europe.

In this thrilling adventure by bestselling author Oliver Pötzsch, thirteen-year-old Lukas has been trained as a swordsman by his father, a nobleman who was once a famed Musketeer. When the threat of war and accusations of witchcraft spread across the land, Lukas's life is forever changed. He flees his home and vows to find his missing sister.

From the author of The Good Wife of Bath comes this brilliant recreation of the vibrant, optimistic but politically treacherous world of London's Restoration theatre, where we are introduced to the remarkable playwright Aphra Behn, now a feminist icon but then an anomaly, who gravitated to the stage—a place where artifice and disguise are second nature and accommodates those who do not fit in.