Quote:
Originally Posted by desertblues
hm, hm, I'm halfway in the book, but it bugs me that the writer treats the Middle Ages as a period of stagnant waters, without any intellectual development at all...
This being said; I do like the description of the search for manuscripts, though I doubt the assumption that this was the one thing, the decisive factor in the swerve from the Renaissance into Modern times. I mean; many historians disagree about which period was when and where....so, I would like to see some context here.
Reading this book as a kind of historic detective is one thing, but reading it as a thorough research in the medieval and renaissance period is quite another matter.  |
Not sure I agree with you, desertblues. I don't think that Greenblatt claims that this one text was responsible for everything that came after its discovery, but it would surely have been of huge interest and a stimulus for new ways of thinking once it started being disseminated, admittedly among a relatively small group of educated people.
And I think that Greenblatt has done a great deal of research in the area he is discussing; but of course it is just one bit of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, in a few countries in Western Europe.
Check out the footnotes and references if you haven't got to them yet - or do you flick back and forth? I must admit I find that hard to do in an ebook, and tend to do a chapter at a time of footnotes.