Renaissance literature Puns

For dawn of humanity to 1,500 AD, see this post.

As mentioned in the previous post, I am embarking on an interesting project. I intend to experience the best art and media humanity has to offer before I die. Namely this is all the highly notable and interesting books, plays, art, music, films, TV shows, and video games. I guess you could call it a bucket list. I've been indexing it chronologically and downloading it to an external hard drive.

The second major chunk of this project after ancient/medieval/classical era literature is the Renaissance, especially in England. Amazingly, the span between 1587-1614 has about as many entries for this project than the dawn of humanity to 1,500. I have naturally included many of Shakespeare's work, as well as a number of well-known works by other playwrights in the same era. But it's very possible that amazing works have slipped through the cracks in my research. Please let me know if you spot anything I've missed that you would consider highly notable, something I wouldn't want to miss:

• 1508 Amadís de Gaula
• 1511 In Praise of Folly
• 1516 Orlando Furioso
• 1516 Utopia (book)
• 1532 The Prince
• 1534 Gargantua and Pantagruel
• 1543 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
• 1543 On the Jews and Their Lies
• 1550 Deck the Halls
• 1550 Popol Vuh
• 1555 Les Prophéties
• 1568 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
• 1570 Spem in alium
• 1572 Os Lusíadas
• 1579 An Apology for Poetry
• 1580 Greensleeves
• 1587 The Spanish Tragedy
• 1588 Tamburlaine
• 1589 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
• 1589 Water Margin
• 1590 The Jew of Malta
• 1590 The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• 1591 Doctor Faustus (play)
• 1591 Henry VI, Part 1
• 1591 Henry VI, Part 2
• 1591 Henry VI, Part 3
• 1591 The Taming of the Shrew
• 1592 Edward II (play)
• 1592 Titus Andronicus
• 1593 Dido, Queen of Carthage (play)
• 1593 Richard III (play)
• 1593 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)
• 1594 The Comedy of Errors
• 1594 The Rape of Lucrece
• 1595 A Midsummer Night's Dream
• 1595 Love's Labour's Lost
• 1595 Richard II (play)
• 1595 Romeo and Juliet
• 1596 Jin Ping Mei
• 1596 The Faerie Queene
• 1597 Daemonologie
• 1597 Essays (Francis Bacon)
• 1597 Henry IV, Part 1
• 1597 The Merchant of Venice
• 1597 The Merry Wives of Windsor
• 1598 Every Man in His Humour
• 1598 Henry IV, Part 2
• 1599 As You Like It
• 1599 Henry V (play)
• 1599 Julius Cae

Hi.

Several months ago, I read a beautiful excerpt which did a wonderful job describing the severity of starvation during a 'historical' point in time. Problem is, as you may have guessed: I can't find it.

I'm fairly certain it was written reflecting the medieval period of Europe and I'm under the impression that it was written by a scholar who lived in that time period. In truth, however, it may be historical fiction, non-european, and/or non-medieval.

I'll list what I can remember below:

'mouths stained green' - in reference to the peasants turning to grass in desperation.

'but the crows did not feast, for there was nothing left of them' - my favorite quote and possibly the reason why I may remember this passage. Describing that the peasants were so terribly malnourished that even wild beasts wanted nothing to do with them. A bit of a grand claim, perhaps, but striking nonetheless.

I've recently come across a history youtuber who said that we should give Constantinople and its library more credit for preserving alledegly two thirds of ancient greek literature. That made me wonder and I found out that in the medieval period scholars had a vastly different landscape of ancient literature than we do today.

I.e. The oldest fragments of Plato come copies from around 800 C.E. Do we know where these texts came from, where they were preserved or can we at best make educated guesses? Would a scholar in Constantinople around 1200 have a much broader picture of ancient philosophy than, say, one in the HRE? Is there really such a big credit due to the library of Constantinople?

Additionally I'd like to ask if the 'theory' my history teacher at high school dropped (years ago) that the fleeing/migrating scholars from the Byzantine empire contributed to the revival of antiquity in the West or is this just hogwash?

https://old.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/q0lzmv/english_literature_pickup_lines/hf93l4v/

This is the time, friends❤️ Isaac Newton discovered gravity while in quarantine and Shakespeare wrote King Lear, along with Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

Hey guys, if there's anyone out there who is still looking let me know, I'm a tad older than most of you guys, female, 46, from Scotland (English literature / historical musicology, novelist, journalist, musician and creative writing tutor). Obsessions: Hamlet, Renaissance music, classic ghost stories, history of anatomy/medicine, philosophy, just to name a few. I've always loved writing letters and I'm kind of used to it, so I think this should be fun. Let me know if you're interested. Platonic exchange only. Many thanks and have a nice day. x

https://preview.redd.it/pcr9j6bt2wv51.jpg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8355967f4d4526fa3ea34c5a6d7a25c323046900

Hey all, don’t know if this is the right subreddit or not so please let me know if it would be better elsewhere!

So I’m currently working on an essay which looks at the presentation of Dionysus in Renaissance literature, but my main trouble is that I can’t seem to find literary works which feature Dionysus as a figure, rather than as a concept. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Which one of the following books/plays would you say praises its society it takes place in the most?

• Heptameron
• Hamlet
• Don Quixote
• Fuenteovejuna
• The Abencerraje

I am researching books from different time periods which have elements that praise the society that they’re set in and have used The Aeneid (ancient), The Canterbury Tales (medieval) but now I’m stuck for ideas for the Renaissance! Please refer me to another sub if it’s not appropriate here

Keep the ICBM nuclear arsenal intact so we can posture a MAD conclusion to major conflict. .

Keep a minimal standing military positioned to protect points of invasion.

Everybody else gets pink slips and scholarship offers.

If I can say anything that isn't clear in the title, lmk.

I don't really know anything about art styles, eras, whatever the word even is, so I could be way off base with my description of "pre-ren", but it's... pre-realistic? like the moony, cherub-y, kind of "off" in the face. Stylistically similar to this, but more morose than serene.

I liked this picture enough to get it scanned back then, which was kind of a big deal. My computer was burgled from my house halfway between then and now, and for all the many things that I lost forever then, this picture is one of the few things that still hang in the mind.

Maybe not a nun's habit, but more like Lady Olenna's headdress thing.

Oh, the textbook was in the southern US. could have been senior HS or freshman college. I lean toward HS because the textbook wasn't brand-new (ie i had to buy it or i'd have had it). But then again, the Beowulf was very dry and full of old language oddities, so that makes me lean college, but like I said I didn't own the book so that's weird.

It might not be a bad idea to start from specific textbooks in use around then with Beowulf in them, and a difficult-ish translation at that. Almost by necessity a popular one. It's not my wheelhouse but I might recognize something run by me.

Also what was the imitation of the era like if anyone knows what that means because I don't know what my teacher is referring to for that

>Female homoeroticism, however, was so common in English literature and theater that historians suggest it was fashionable for a period during the Renaissance.

I read this on wiki and I’ve been wondering what we’re the works during that time that had lesbianism in them?

Hi all,

Recently I've been reading and watching documentaries about artists from the Renaissance time in Italy. People like Raphael, Michelangelo, Bernini, Da Vinci etc. I find their work amazing, of course, and I was then wondering about their education. It seems to me quite clear that, in many cases, they started working in some other artist workshop at an early age (e.g., early teens) and there they started learning their main professional skill. But what about the literate education on classic texts from ancient Rome, Greek, ancient philosophers, poets, or even the Bible and the work of saints of the Catholic church? Since these were often topics of their representations (Raphael's school of Athens, Bernini's Saint Ambrose, etc.), how much did they actually know about these subjects? Did they study on the texts? Or was their knowledge about them coming from the same subject representation by previous masters and didn't have direct knowledge of it? Maybe they didn't have formal education around these topics, then do we know whether they individually acquired this kind of knowledge?

I would be very curious to know about this! I looked around a bit but I couldn't find any source mentioning this, but I am not particularly knowledgeable in history :)

Thank you in advance for your answers!

Hi. Would really appreciate it if anyone could give an in-depth explanation of the idea of 'performativity' and possibly point out some flaws, interesting ideas or possible complications/contradictions with using it in this essay: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/265283

Thanks

I am not African-American (I come from an Irish family living in Canada) but I found this to be highly offensive. Is this a common opinion in academia?

I have a friend's birthday coming up, and she absolutely adores italian renaissance fashion. I thought I might try to find her a book about it or something akin to that. She loves historic fashion in general, so if I could find anything to do with that, it'd be great! Thank you so much for your help, take care.

The presenter was a historian and the podcast is always high quality, so I assume she wasn't inaccurate in saying that. But at the same time it's not as though nothing fictional was written in Europe for the whole of the Early Middle Ages, so I'm trying to unpack what exactly she would have been referring to.

I've long been struck by the parallels between the ideals of chivalry and courtly love as portrayed in the medieval and early renaissance Romance genre, most notably in the reworking of Celtic legends to create the version of King Arthur and Camelot that's most familiar to modern readers, and the 'solider-saint' Islamic ideal. Up until today I'd thought it largely a coincidence rather than being directly linked as I did not much explore the Arabist theory when learning about Romance genre (used specifically here to refer to the genre or Knights and Damsels in distress and searching for the Holy Grail etc and not to be conflated with the related but separate modern Romance.)

However today in answering another question on this subreddit I was reminded of the Arabist theory, that the Romance genre owed its Provence to the crusades and to the melding of Islamic literary forms, but more significantly for this question of Islamic moral codes, with Western European Christianity and pre-Christian pagan Celtic Myths.

My question - but please elaborate and go off on interesting tangents if you wish! - is how far do historians (and interested parties from related disciplines) credit the Arabist theory that the Romance genre (and the related courtly love genre) was in part a direct result of the crusades? (The timing is perfect of course) and was it a way for people to smuggle in Islamic and Pagan ideas under the eyes of a controlling Church?

Is the Chivalrous Knight actually the Islamic Solider-Saint in disguise?

I've been reading a fair bit recently about the late medieval/early Renaissance Balkans, particularly Bosnia over the course of early Ottoman rule and I'm on the lookout for primary sources from that period. I've come across Fra Matija Divkovic (forgive me my missing accents), but unfortunately, I don't speak Bosnian and sure as heck can't read Glagolitic or Cyrillic script.

I'm hoping someone in this sub might have some background with that material or even Croatian or Serbian early Renaissance texts in translation. English makes my life easiest, but I can get by with French and my very bad Latin if need be.

Fuck you

Isaac Newton discovered gravity while in quarantine and Shakespeare wrote King Lear, along with Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. As difficult as these times are, the amount of love, support, and creativity revolving around the world is beautiful. We got this guys! Imagine how appreciative and joyful we’ll be once we’re back on campus❤️

>Female homoeroticism, however, was so common in English literature and theater that historians suggest it was fashionable for a period during the Renaissance.

I read this on wiki and I’ve been wondering what we’re the works during that time that had lesbianism in them?