Стивен Гринблатт – лучшие книги

Ренессанса могло бы и не существовать.
Не было бы ни шедевров Леонардо да Винчи и Микеланджело, ни блис­тательного политического цинизма Макиавелли, ни всей эпохи расцвета наук и искусств, времени создания гениальных произведений живописи, ли­тературы и философии. Не было бы, если бы однажды собиратель старинных рукописей Поджо Браччолини не натолкнулся в монастырской библиотеке на некий старин­ный манускрипт...
Так была обнаружена считавшаяся доселе утраченной поэма Лукреция О ПРИРОДЕ ВЕЩЕЙ, пролежавшая в забвении сотни лет. Рукопись проповедовала крайне "опасные" идеи гуманизма и материа­лизма, учила радоваться жизни, отрицала религиозное ханжество и мрако­бесие. Она повлияла на формирование мировоззрения Галилея и Фрейда. Томаса Джефферсона, Дарвина и Эйнштейна Возрождение поэмы из небытия изменило ход европейской истории. Но как это произошло?..

Рассказ об Адаме и Еве скромно занимает около пятидесяти строк в Писании, однако он таит в себе поразительные парадоксы: мужчина и женщина, рожденные взрослыми и не испытывающими стыда от наготы, говорящий змей-искуситель, древо, плоды которого даруют познание добра и зла. Эта история, полная немыслимых сцен и событий, веками не давала покоя философам и мыслителям — ее анализировали, обсуждали и трактовали — буквально и аллегорически.

В этой книге Стивен Гринблатт — доктор философии и профессор гуманитарных наук — проводит читателя от первых древних историй о создании человека до всем известной дарвиновской теории происхождения видов. Этот путь проходит через мысли святого Августина, решившего трактовать каждую строку Писания буквально, и мастерские талантливых художников — от живописца Альбрехта Дюрера, создавшего знаменитую гравюру «Адам и Ева», до Джона Мильтона, написавшего «Потерянный рай».

A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world's greatest playwright. A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist.

As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, and the societies they rule over, Stephen Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the catastrophic consequences of its execution. Cherished institutions seem fragile, political classes are in disarray, economic misery fuels populist anger, people knowingly accept being lied to, partisan rancor dominates, spectacular…

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and it changed the course of history.

He found a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas – that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thoughts of Montaigne, Darwin and Einstein.

An innovative work of history by one of the world’s most celebrated scholars and a thrilling story of discovery, The Swerve details how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made possible the world as we know it.

Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald, and his work is quirky, sonorous, and enchanting.

Here this baroque master’s two most enduring and admired works, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, appear in a new edition that has been annotated and introduced by the distinguished scholars Ramie Targoff and Stephen Greenblatt (author of the best-selling Will in the World and the National Book Award–winning The Swerve). In Religio Medici Browne mulls over the relation between his medical profession and his profession of the Christian faith, pondering the respective claims of science and religion, questions that are still very much alive today. The discovery of an ancient burial site in an English field prompted Browne to write Urne-Buriall, which is both an early anthropological examination of different practices of interment and a profound meditation on mortality. Its grave and exquisite music has resounded for generations.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature – Victorian 8e V E