The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks- the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. This first volume in Richard Taruskin's majestic history, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century , sweeps across centuries of musical innovation to shed light on the early forces that shaped the development of the Western classical tradition. Beginning with the invention of musical notation more than a thousand years ago, Taruskin addresses topics such as the legend of Saint Gregory and Gregorian chant, Augustine's and Boethius's thoughts on music, the liturgical dramas of Hildegard of Bingen, the growth of the music printing business, the literary revolution and the English madrigal, the influence of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the operas of Monteverdi. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.

In this provocative and wholly absorbing work, Lisa Jardine offers a radical interpretation of the Renaissance, arguing that the creation of culture during that time was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth -- that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought. As Jardine boldly states, The seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance. While Europe's royalty and merchants competed with each other to acquire works of art, vicious commercial battles were being fought over who should control the centers for trade around the globe. Jardine encompasses Renaissance culture from its western borders in Christendom to its eastern reaches in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, bringing this opulent epoch to life in all its material splendor and competitive acquisitiveness. A savvy, street-smart history of the Renaissance.--Dan Cryer, Newsday Jardine's lively book is specific and down-to-earth. A particularly fascinating section recalls how books suddenly ceased to be principally collector's items or aids to scholars and became the sixteenth century's Internet, dispensing fact and fancy to high and low.--The New Yorker

A historical fiction that presents the life and loves of Jacqueline of Hainault, thrice married, thrice imprisoned and ransomed; the extraordinary 15th-century life of a women who endured the power politics of the courts of England, Burgundy, and France.

Of all the activities of the most neglected century in English History, England's trade has received the least attention in proportion to its importance. It was obviously in the course of the later Middle Ages, and more particularly in the fifteenth century, that there took place the great transformation from medieval England, isolated and intensely local, to the England of the Tudor and Stuart age, with its world-wide connections and imperial designs. It was during the same period that most of the forms of international trade characteristic of the Middle Ages were replaced by new methods of commercial organization and regulation, national in scope and at times definitely nationalistic in object, and that a marked movement towards capitalist methods and principles took place in the sphere of domestic trade. Yet little has been written concerning English trade in this period. First published in 1933, this classic volume goes a long way to fills this gap superbly. There is an abundance of material, and the writers have compiled a statistical analysis of the Enrolled Customs Account from 1377-1482, which provides an essential measure of the nature, volume, and movement of English foreign commerce during the period.

Although much has been written over the years about the ancient mystery religions and their influence on the intellectual life of the Renaissance, scholars have neglected their role in art. This is a serious omission in the case of one of the most popular cultic deities, the Mother Goddess, whose colorful myths and exotic rites, described in fascinating detail by classical authors, became a rich source of imagery for Renaissance writers, antiquarians, and artists. She was especially important to the Neoplatonist philosophers of the period, for whom she embodied the idea of love as the great universal bond and conveyor of divine influences to the mortal realm. In this ground-breaking study, Edith Balas draws upon a wide range of humanistic learning to examine the significance of the Mother Goddess and her cult in the works of such major figures as Botticelli, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael, as well in those of a host of lesser artists, including Neroccio de' Landi, Baltasare Peruzzi, Giorgio Vasari, and Pirro Ligorio. Dr. Balas not only provides additional keys to solving the often dauntingly complex riddles posed by many Quattrocento and Cinquecento images―images originally intended to be understood only by a learned elite―but also furnishes scholars with a valuable methodological model for analyzing the presence and meaning of other ancient religious cults in Renaissance art.