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"The first major exhibition in forty-five years devoted to the Burgundian Netherlandish artist Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532) brings together Gossart's paintings, drawings, and prints and places them in the context of the art and artists that influenced his transformation from Late Gothic Mannerism to the new Renaissance mode. Gossart was among the first northern artists to travel to Rome to make copies after antique sculpture and introduce historical and mythological subjects with erotic nude figures into the mainstream of northern painting. Most often credited with successfully assimilating Italian Renaissance style into northern European art of the early sixteenth century, he is the pivotal Old Master who changed the course of Flemish art from the Medieval craft tradition of its founder, Jan van Eyck (ca. 1380/90-1441), and charted new territory that eventually led to the great age of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). "

„In August 1617 a small group of Saxon nobles gathered in Castle Hornstein near Weimar to establish a type of institution previously unknown on German soil ‚the learned society'. It was based on the Italian model of the previous century and specifically on the Academia della Crusca of Florence, to whose ranks one of its founding members, Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen, had been elected in 1600. Ludwig was the chief benefactor and the head of this new German society until his death in 1650, and he and its other founding members sought inspiration in their pursuit of learning from the many Italian literary societies which had contributed so much to the purification and normalization of Italian letters in the sixteenth century. The new German society was called the ‚Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft', the Fruitbearing Society, and its motto was „Alles zum Nutzen" - ‚Everything for a purpose'".

"Engravings are objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy whose visual language is composed entirely of lines. From 1480 to 1650 Renaissance and Baroque (Early Modern) engravers made dramatic and rapid visual changes to the technique of engraving as they responded to the demands of reproducing artworks. ‚The Brilliant Line' follows these visual transformations and offers new insight intothe special inventiveness and technical virtuosity of Early Modern engravers."

"Welcome to the new website of Shakespeare's Words, the online version of the best-selling glossary and language companion.The site integrates the full text of the plays and poems with the entire Glossary database, allowing you to search for any word or phrase in Shakespeare's works, and in particular to find all instances of all words that can pose a difficulty to the modern reader."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Renaissance Astrology. In Act I Scene II of King Lear, the ne'er do well Edmund steps forward and rails at the weakness and cynicism of his fellow men: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, - often the surfeit of our own behaviour, - we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity. The focus of his attack is astrology and the credulity of those who fall for its charms. But the idea that earthly life was ordained in the heavens was essential to the Renaissance understanding of the world. The movements of the heavens influenced many things from the practice of medicine to major political decisions. Every renaissance court had its astrologer including Elizabeth Ist and the mysterious Dr. John Dee who chose the most propitious date for her coronation. But astrologers also worked in the universities and on the streets, reading horoscopes, predicting crop failures and rivalling priests and doctors as pillars of the local community. But why did astrological ideas flourish in the period, how did astrologers interpret and influence the course of events and what new ideas eventually brought the astrological edifice tumbling down? With Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London; Lauren Kassell, Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge; and Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde."

"But it is now the quadricentennial of Milton's birth in 1608, and it is startling that this work, once central to the literary and religious experience of the English-speaking world, is so much a curiosity, sentenced to the margins by its preoccupations with biblical interpretation, condemned by the density of its prosody, which does not instantly seduce but, instead, commands the reader to give way before it, persisting until no resistance is possible. So perhaps the most we can expect is the library's modest, one-room exhibition "John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life."

"Created in Utrecht, The Netherlands, around 1440, the manuscript was taken apart sometime before 1856. Its leaves were shuffled and then rebound into two volumes to make each look more or less complete."

"Vergesst Aeneas nicht! Enea Silvio Piccolomini - Humanist, Poet, Gelehrter, Diplomat und Papst. Vor 600 Jahren wurde Enea Silvio Piccolomini geboren, der als Papst Pius II. in die Kirchengeschichte eingegangen ist, mit seinem literarischen Werk und seinen biografischen und historischen Schriften aber wohl mehr in die Waagschale gelegt hat."