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RR 2000/430 Encyclopedia of the Renaissance Editor In Chief Paul F. Grendler Charles Scribner's Sons (Gale Group) New York, NY 2000 6 vols. ISBN 0 684 80514 6
$695.00
Published In association with The Renaissance Society of America
Keywords History, Art, Literature
This work arrived for our review amidst a fanfare of awards: of the Dartmouth Medal for an outstanding reference resource, and selection as the Editor's choice for the best reference title 1999 in Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin, as well as inclusion in Library Journal's best reference sources for 1999 list and selection for the RUSA annual outstanding reference list. Having examined the work, now published in the UK, for myself, I can only agree with our colleagues who have so honoured this new title: yes, it really is that good.
To many people "The Renaissance" means classical Italian painting and sculpture, and perhaps after some thought some later Elizabethan poetry. But it was, if not worldwide, certainly an enormously widespread permeating cultural movement, as well as a chronological period in history. Leading from Petrarch and the humanist scholars into all aspects of learning, art, literature and philosophy, it changed the intellectual world, but did so within the broader context of an existing world with all its problems, beliefs, primitive inheritances and social constructs. The sheer breadth of such an all-embracing intellectual movement is therefore enormous, and is superbly captured in this remarkably comprehensive encyclopaedia. We have, of course, reviewed a number of works, general (for example, Black et al., 1993; Fletcher, 2000; Magill, 1999) and more specialist; but this stands out in a class of its own as the one standard reference source for the subject.
If the Renaissance as a movement is largely defined to posterity by fine arts, intellectually also it depended on the word and on the dissemination of words. So, there are entries for printing and publishing as well as for manuscripts: it was not accidental that printing with movable type became an effective invention in the course of - and as demonstrated by Eisenstein (1979) and others as the leading causal agent in - a time of such cultural innovation. Libraries also have their own entry and branches of literature extend to such topics as travel and travel literature,...