Humanities*: Books/eBooks

The creativity of the human mind was brilliantly displayed during the Florentine Renaissance when artists, mathematicians, astronomers, apothecaries, architects, and others embraced the interconnectedness of their disciplines.

With commanding skill, Thomas R. Martin tells the remarkable and dramatic story of how a tiny, poor, and threatened settlement grew to become, during its height, the dominant power in the Mediterranean world for five hundred years.

The Baroque period lasted from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Baroque art was artists’ response to the Catholic Church’s demand for solemn grandeur following the Council of Trent, and through its monumentality and grandiloquence it seduced the great European courts.

The Renaissance began at the end of the 14th century in Italy and had extended across the whole of Europe by the second half of the 16th century. The rediscovery of the splendour of ancient Greece and Rome marked the beginning of the rebirth of the arts following the break-down of the dogmatic certitude of the Middle Ages.

By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years

Featuring essays from leading philosophical scholars, 12 Modern Philosophers explores the works, origins, and influences of twelve of the most important late 20th Century philosophers working in the analytic tradition.