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"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."

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the culture of the Baroque. What do the music of Bach, the Colonnades of St Peter's, the paintings of Caravaggio and the rebuilding of Prague have in common? The answer is the Baroque - a term used to describe a vast array of painting, music, architecture and sculpture from the 17th and 18th centuries. Baroque derives from the word for a misshapen pearl and denotes an art of effusion, drama, grandeur and powerful emotion. Strongly religious it became the aesthetic of choice of absolute monarchs. But the more we examine the Baroque, the more subtle and mysterious it becomes. It is impossible to discuss 17th century Europe without it, yet it is increasingly hard to say what it is. It was coined as a term of abuse, denounced by thinkers of the rational Enlightenment and by Protestant cultures which read into Baroque the excess, decadence and corruption they saw in the Catholic Church. With Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge; Nigel Aston, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Leicester and Helen Hills, Professor of Art History at the University of York."

I'm Sharon Howard, and since summer 2006 I've been working at the University of Sheffield as Project Manager for two digital primary source projects: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey/Central Criminal Court and London Lives and the Making of Modern London 1690-1800. I'm now working on Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900, a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History. I've been running an early modern resources website in one form or another since about 2000 and started this blog in June 2004.

"Francesco Petrarca was born on July 20, 1304. Commemorations of the 700th anniversary of his birth are taking place this year (2004), primarily in Italy but also around the world and in the United States. At Yale University, the celebration includes an international conference on Petrarch, September 23 - 25, and an exhibition at the Beinecke Library, as well as this web exhibition. The Beinecke Library is the leading institution in the United States in collecting Petrarch manuscripts (codices or fragments that contain works by or about Francesco Petrarca), from popular copies of the Canzoniere and Trionfi to the lesser-known De remediis utruisque fortune and Nota de Laura, as well as the memoirs and drawings of the English clergyman and literary editor John Mitford (1781-1859). "

"Renaissance Forum is an interdisciplinary refereed journal. It specialises in early-modern English literary and historical scholarship and in the critical methodologies of these fields. The journal is published biannually by an editorial board based in the Departments of English and History at the University of Hull."

„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'".