Written by the greatest Italian poet and thinker of the 19th century, these timeless musings contain immense philosophical and psychological insight. Ranging from mankind to nature, social order to the individual soul, they reveal a man of brilliance struggling to reconcile all that he sees around him.

    The only unabridged prose translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso - a witty parody of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France - this version faithfully recaptures the entire narrative and the subtle meanings behind it.

    Inventive, humorous, inexhaustible, the story recounts Orlando's love-stricken pursuit of "the fairest of her Sex, Angelica" (in Milton's terms) through a fairyland that combines the military valors of Charlemagne's knights and their famous horses with the enchantments of King Arthur's court. Today it seems more than ever appropriate to offer a new, unabridged edition of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, the first Renaissance epic about the common customs of, and the conflicts between, Christian Europe and Islam. Having extensively revised his earlier translation for general readers, Charles Ross has added headings and helpful summaries to Boiardo's cantos. Tenses have been regularized, and terms of gender and religion have been updated, but not so much as to block the reader's encounter with how Boiardo once viewed the world. Charles Stanley Ross has degrees from Harvard College and the University of Chicago and teaches English and comparative literature at Purdue University. "Neglect of Italian romances robs us of a whole species of pleasure and narrows our very conception of literature. It is as if a man left out Homer, or Elizabethan drama, or the novel. For like these, the romantic epic of Italy is one of the great trophies of the European genius: a genuine kind, not to be replaced by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and brilliant production. It is one of the successes, the undisputed achievements." -C. S. Lewis

    When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. THE CONSOLATION was written in the period leading up to his brutal execution. It is a dialogue of alternating prose and verse between the ailing prisoner and his 'nurse' Philosophy. Her instruction on the nature of fortune and happiness, good and evil, fate and free will, restore his health and bring him to enlightenment. THE CONSOLATION was extremely popular throughout medieval Europe and his ideas were influential on the thought of Chaucer and Dante.

    The Enneads bring together Neoplatonism--mystic passion and ideas from Greek philosophy--together with striking variants of the Trinity and other central Christian doctrines, to produce a highly original synthesis.

    

    Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities." When William James went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on "natural religion," he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Considering religion, then, not as it is defined by--or takes place in--the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life, he undertook a project that, upon completion, stands not only as one of the most important texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality, but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century. Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, it is easy to see why. Applying his analytic clarity to religious accounts from a variety of sources, James elaborates a pluralistic framework in which "the divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions." It's an intellectual call for serious religious tolerance--indeed, respect--the vitality of which has not diminished through the subsequent decades.

    Passionate, ecstatic, and spiritual, his poems are a blend of exquisite lyricism and profound mystical thought. In The Poems of St. John of the Cross John Frederick Nims presents his superlative translation of the complete poems, re-creating the religious fervor of St. John's art.This dual-language edition makes available the original Spanish from the Codex of Sanlúcon de Barrameda with facing English translations. The work concludes with two essays—a critique of the poetry and a short piece on the Spanish text that appears alongside the translation—as well as brief notes on the individual poems.

    It paints an intricate picture of daily life in the courts and streets of fifteenth-century France and gives a fascinating glimpse into the practical considerations of running a household, dressing appropriately and maintaining a reputation in all circumstances. Christine de Pizan’s book provides a valuable counterbalance to male accounts of life in the middle ages and demonstrates, often with dry humour, how a woman’s position in society could be made less precarious by following the correct etiquette.

    Verga's style is swift, sure, and implacable; he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath, and tells them with a stark economy of words. There's something dark and tightly coiled at the heart of each story, an ironic, bitter resolution that is belied by the deceptive simplicity of Verga's prose, and Verga strikes just when the reader's not expecting it. Translator D. H. Lawrence surely found echoes of his own upbringing in Verga's sketches of Sicilian life: the class struggle between property owners and tenants, the relationship between men and the land, and the unsentimental, sometimes startlingly lyric evocation of the landscape. Just as Lawrence veers between loving and despising the industrial North and its people, so too Verga shifts between affection for and ironic detachment from the superstitious, uneducated, downtrodden working poor of Sicily. If Verga reserves pity for anyone or anything, it is the children and the animals, but he doesn't spare them. In his experience, it is the innocents who suffer first and last and always.

    She undertook preaching tours throughout the German empire at the age of sixty, and was consulted not only by her religious contemporaries but also by kings and emperors, yet it is largely for her apocalyptic and mystical writings that she is remembered. This volume includes selections from her three visionary works, her treatises on medicine and the natural world, her devotional songs, and fascinating letters to prominent figures of her time. Dealing with such eternal subjects as the relationship between humans and nature, and men and women, Hildegard's works show her to be a wide-ranging thinker who created such fresh, startling images and ideas that her writings have been compared to Dante and Blake.

    Unjustly neglected today, Tasso's epic poem 'Jerusalem Delivered'(first published in 1581) is set in the 11th century and tells the story of the First Crusade and the siege which gave Christian armies control over Jerusalem and the Holy Lands for a time.As in other epic poems, 'Jerusalem Delivered' deftly mixes history and myth. Tasso's heroes - Godfrey, leader of the Christian armies; Rinaldo, bravest of the Christian warriors; and Tancred, the Italian prince who falls in love with the pagan warrioress Clorinda, whom he eventually (andsimultaneously) converts and kills - must face not only the Saracens and their allies, but also a host of fearsome and manipulative devils, demons, and sorcerers. This is a sweeping and often thrilling tale of war, faith, love, and sex that easily rivals its classical predecessors. Writing at a time when Christianity was bitterly divided, Tasso was naturally concerned with the nature of leadership and loyalty, with the importance of sacrifice, with the evils of corruption, and with the existence of truth, themes that continue to resonate today. No wonder that for three centuries, 'Jerusalem Delivered' was considered the great modern epic. Indeed, Spenser borrowed scenes and episodes from this poem in writing the 'Faerie Queen', and Milton was greatly influenced by Tasso when writing his own Christian epic, 'Paradise Lost'.English-language readers who are familiar with Tasso's grand romance have until now known it only through a verse translation by English poet Edward Fairfax published in 1600. In order to fit Tasso's stanzas into the then popular Spenserian verse form, Fairfax had to alter the original poem considerably. Now, 400 years later, Anthony Esolen presents a new translation that transforms 'Jerusalem Delivered' into an English-language masterpiece. The first major verse translation into English since Fairfax's, Esolen's version is both more true to its original source and more fluid than that of hisElizabethan predecessor. Esolen has translated 'Jerusalem Delivered' with the care of poet, capturing the delight of Tasso's descriptions, the different voices of its cast of characters, the shadingsbetween glory and tragedy, and does them all in an English as powerful as Tasso's Italian. Esolen's will immediately be acclaimed as the definitive translation of this powerful work of faith and war. Like theFagles 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey', the Pinsky 'Inferno', and Seamus Heaney's imaginative new rendering of 'Beowulf', Anthony Esolen's bold, fast-moving, and faithful translation of Tasso'sCrusade-era adventure will introduce a new generation of readers to a masterpiece of world literature.

    In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.

    Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.

    An early traveller to the Americas who sailed on one of Columbus's voyages, Las Casas was so horrified by the wholesale massacre he witnessed that he dedicated his life to protecting the Indian community. He wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542, a shocking catalogue of mass slaughter, torture and slavery, which showed that the evangelizing vision of Columbus had descended under later conquistadors into genocide. Dedicated to Philip II to alert the Castilian Crown to these atrocities and demand that the Indians be entitled to the basic rights of humankind, this passionate work of documentary vividness outraged Europe and contributed to the idea of the Spanish 'Black Legend' that would last for centuries.