'And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of all of them I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no one contradicted me' - Christopher Columbus Marvelous Possessions is a study of the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was cunningly yoked by Columbus and others to the service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to breaking-point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that the experience of the marvelous is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Lery, and Montaigne - and notably in Mandeville's Travels, the most popular travel book of the Middle Ages - wonder is the sign of a remarkably tolerant recognition of cultural difference.

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. The Clarendon Lectures and the Carpenter Lectures, 1988 (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Greenblatt, Stephen J.

Literature & Fiction

Clarendon Press

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. The book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, "On the Nature of Things," by Lucretius -- a thrillingly beautiful poem of the most dangerous of ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno, shaping the thoughts of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and influencing writers from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson.

Swerve: How the Renaissance Began

History

Europe

Bodley Head

The author has been at the centre of a shift in literary interpretation towards a critical method that places cultural creation in historical context. This book exemplifies the method in an examination of how collective beliefs and experiences are shaped, transferred from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable form, and offered to the public on the stage. As well as providing a new way of understanding Shakespeare, the book is an original analysis of a cultural process. The first chapter introduces the methods and purposes of the new historicism, and later chapters consider the types of cultural negotiation that shape the four main genres of Shakespearean drama: history, comedy, tragedy and romance. Particular reference is made to "Henry IV", "Henry V", "Twelth Night", "King Lear" and "The Tempest", and the book includes analyses of such aspects of early modern culture as exorcism, cross-dressing, colonial propaganda and martial law codes.

Shakespearean negotiations: The circulation of social energy in Renaissance England (The New historicism : studies in cultural poetics)

University of California Press

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Books by Greenblatt, Stephen J.