The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus

The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus PDF Author: Valerie Irene Jane Flint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400887178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rather than focusing on the well-rehearsed facts of Columbus's achievements in the New World, Valerie Flint looks instead at his imaginative mental images, the powerful "fantasies" that gave energy to his endeavors in the Renaissance. With him on his voyages into the unknown, he carried medieval notions gleaned from a Mediterranean tradition of tall tales about the sea, from books he had read, and from the mappae-mundi, splendid schematic maps with fantastic inhabitants. After investigating these sources of Columbus's views, Flint explains how the content of his thinking influenced his reports on his discoveries. Finally, she argues that problems besetting his relationship with the confessional teaching of the late medieval church provided the crucial impelling force behind his entire enterprise. As Flint follows Columbus to the New World and back, she constantly relates his reports both to modern reconstructions of what he really saw and to the visual and literary sources he knew. She argues that he declined passively to accept authoritative pronouncements, but took an active part in debate, seeking to prove and disprove theses that he knew to be controversial among his contemporaries. Flint's efforts to take Columbus seriously are so convincing that his belief that he had approached the site of the earthly Paradise seems not quaint but eminently sensible on his own terms. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus

The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus PDF Author: Valerie Irene Jane Flint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400887178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rather than focusing on the well-rehearsed facts of Columbus's achievements in the New World, Valerie Flint looks instead at his imaginative mental images, the powerful "fantasies" that gave energy to his endeavors in the Renaissance. With him on his voyages into the unknown, he carried medieval notions gleaned from a Mediterranean tradition of tall tales about the sea, from books he had read, and from the mappae-mundi, splendid schematic maps with fantastic inhabitants. After investigating these sources of Columbus's views, Flint explains how the content of his thinking influenced his reports on his discoveries. Finally, she argues that problems besetting his relationship with the confessional teaching of the late medieval church provided the crucial impelling force behind his entire enterprise. As Flint follows Columbus to the New World and back, she constantly relates his reports both to modern reconstructions of what he really saw and to the visual and literary sources he knew. She argues that he declined passively to accept authoritative pronouncements, but took an active part in debate, seeking to prove and disprove theses that he knew to be controversial among his contemporaries. Flint's efforts to take Columbus seriously are so convincing that his belief that he had approached the site of the earthly Paradise seems not quaint but eminently sensible on his own terms. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Book of Prophecies

The Book of Prophecies PDF Author: Christopher Columbus
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1592446485
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 435

Get Book Here

Book Description
Christopher Columbus returned to Europe in the final days of 1500, ending his third voyage to the Indies not in triumph but in chains. Seeking to justify his actions and protect his rights, he began to compile biblical texts and excerpts from patristic writings and medieval theology in a manuscript known as the Book of Prophecies. This unprecedented collection was designed to support his vision of the discovery of the Indies as an important event in the process of human salvation - a first step toward the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim domination. This work is part of a twelve-volume series produced by U.C.L.A.'s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies which involved the collaboration of some forty scholars over the course of fourteen years. In this volume of the series, Roberto Rusconi has written a complete historical introduction to the Book of Prophecies, describing the manuscript's history and analyzing its principal themes. His edition of the documents, the only modern one, includes a complete critical apparatus and detailed commentary, while the facing-page English translations allow Columbus's work to be appreciated by the general public and scholars alike.

The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe

The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe PDF Author: Valerie Irene Jane Flint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691001103
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows how many of the more discerning leaders of the early medieval Church decided to promote magical practices, to appease non- Christian factions and enhance Christianity.

Nature, Culture and History

Nature, Culture and History PDF Author: K. R. Howe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824822866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Get Book Here

Book Description
This text places Oceania in a broad global and intellectual context and explores the meeting of two perceived entities - the west and Pacific peoples. It incorporates such diverse topics as notions of paradise, human destiny, technology, knowing, colonialism, racism, gender, and more.

The Language of Landscape

The Language of Landscape PDF Author: Anne Whiston Spirn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300082944
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes. Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors--Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin--and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

The Venice Variations

The Venice Variations PDF Author: Sophia Psarra
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787352390
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition

European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition PDF Author: Wolfgang Haase
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311087024X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 733

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Great Journeys in History

The Great Journeys in History PDF Author: Robin Hanbury-Tenison
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500775680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Get Book Here

Book Description
A lively collection of the adventurous stories of the greatest explorers in history. Ferdinand Magellan, Genghis Khan, Thor Heyerdahl, Amelia Earhart, and Neil Armstrong: these are some of the greatest travelers of all time. This book chronicles their stories and many more, describing epic voyages—from early trips through the great port city of Alexandria to the latest journeys into space. In antiquity, we follow Alexander the Great to the Indus and Hannibal across the Alps; in medieval times, we trek beside Genghis Khan and Ibn Battuta. The Renaissance eventually led to Columbus visiting the Americas and to the circumnavigation of the world. In the following centuries, global maps are filled in by Abel Tasman, Vitus Bering, and James Cook. Journeys specifically made for scientific discoveries, most famously by Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, begin. In modern times, the ends of the earth were reached—including both poles and the world’s highest mountain. Editor Robin Hanbury-Tenison leads an incredible team of fifty-two contributors, including Robert Ballard and Ranulph Fiennes, who relate firsthand experiences with the journeys and places they describe. The Great Journeys in History chronicles the stories of bold, early travelers who explored the unexplored and who set out into the unknown, bringing alive the romance and thrill of adventure.

Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages

Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages PDF Author: John Block Friedman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135591016
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1446

Get Book Here

Book Description
Trade, Travel, and Exploration: An Encyclopedia is a reference book that covers the peoples, places, technologies, and intellectual concepts that contributed to trade, travel and exploration during the Middle Ages, from the years A.D. 525 to 1492.

Green Imperialism

Green Imperialism PDF Author: Richard H. Grove
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521565134
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, especially its colonial and global aspects.