Horizon Information Portal

e-branch

Home

My Account/Renew Loans

Find Magazine Articles & more

Know thyself : Western identity from classical Greece to the Renaissance / by Ingrid Rossellini.

by Rossellini, Ingrid.

View full image

Doubleday, 2018.

909.09821 R828k

Civilization, Western -- History.

Religion and civilization -- History.

Philosophy and civilization -- History.

Identity (Philosophical concept)

9780385541886 (hc.)

Alternate title:

Western identity from classical Greece to the Renaissance

xxii, 469 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 433-448) and index.

Part one: Ancient Greece -- The Birth of the polis -- Sparta and Athens -- Reason, the irrational and the danger of hubris -- Hesiod and the cosmic origin of the world -- The heroic ideal -- Greek art : reason versus passion -- From mythology to philosophy -- Pythagoras : the divine reason and the immortal soul -- The myth of the rational west versus the irrational east -- Splendor and contradiction of the classical age -- The achievements of theatre, rhetoric and philosophy -- From Plato to Aristotle : the empowering wisdom of philosophy -- The Hellenistic era -- Part two: Ancient Rome -- The Roman Republic : history and myth -- Augustus and the empire : the theatre of politics and power -- Augustus's successors -- The decline of the empire and the rise of Christianity -- Augustine's tale of two cities -- Part three: The early Middle Ages -- The triumph of Christianity and the demise of the rational mind -- The symbolic discourse of art -- The new vocabulary of faith and spirituality -- Latin West versus Greek East -- The monastic experience -- From the iconoclastic revolt to the splendor of Byzantine art -- Charlemagne and feudalism -- Part four: the later Middle Ages -- Church authority versus state authority : a difficult balance of power -- Cities and universities : the dawn of a new cultural era -- A new art for a new sensibility -- The crusades -- Wealth and power versus poverty and humility : the two faces of Christianity -- The rehabilitation of man within the ordered universe of God -- The gradual secularization of culture -- Dante's summa : The Divine Comedy -- Part five: Humanism and the Renaissance -- The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries : the historical context -- The Italian city-states -- Petrarch's literary humanism -- Political humanism -- Florence : the city of splendor -- Lorenzo the Magnificent and his court -- The gathering clouds of disenchantment and cynicism -- The Roman Renaissance : glory and ambiguity -- The Protestant Reformation and the sack of Rome -- The last judgment.

"A lively and timely introduction to the roots of self-understanding--who we are and how we should act--in the cultures of ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and Middle Ages and the Renaissance "Know thyself"--this fundamental imperative appeared for the first time in ancient Greece, specifically in Delphi, the temple of the god Apollo, who represented the enlightened power of reason. For the Greeks, self-knowledge and identity were the basics of their civilization and their sources were to be found in where one was born and into which social group. These determined who you were and what your duties were. In this book the independent scholar Ingrid Rossellini surveys the major ideas that, from Greek and Roman antiquity through the Christian medieval era up to the dawn of modernity in the Renaissance, have guided the Western project of self-knowledge. Addressing the curious lay reader with an interdisciplinary approach that includes numerous references to the visual arts, Know Thyself will reintroduce readers to the most profound and enduring ways our civilization has framed the issues of self and society, in the process helping us rediscover the very building blocks of our personality."--From publisher.

Horizon Information Portal 3.24_8902M

© 2001-2013 SirsiDynix All rights reserved.

Horizon Information Portal