Customer Reviews
a fantastic introduction - By: philosofie, 05 Jan 2009 
this is an excellent introduction, & i can't believe i almost went into my final exams without the benefit of its wisdom! isabel rivers provides a very clear & readable summary of a dozen or so of the main concepts & schools of thought that influenced renaissance thought -in this respect, i suppose, the book is a misnomer because it more about the classical & christian ideas & less about their influence on the renaissance, & even less exclusivelyin poetry (prose is equally covered) - although their usein the renaissance is perfectly adequately covered. rivers manages to include a lot of informationin a small number of pages (her chapters are rarely longer than eight pages) & yet the book is not dense.
what is really great about this book is the novel way it follows each chapter with a series of excerpts from classical to renaissance texts relevant to the issue just discussed. each issue is comprehensively covered, & the variety of authors is large too. it is so nice, & novel, to actually be able to read for oneself some of the paragraphs that shaped the history of, well, western civilisation, without just deducing what they say from summariesin critical books. & these extracts are beautiful, & thought provokingin themselves & have piqued my interestin books i would never have thought to read otherwise -and indeed, books id read but didnt particualrly care about. this book has done more than perhaps any other for my enjoyment of renaissance literature.
the only problem i would say is the lack of date by the extract, which makes it impossible to construct a chronology of changing attitudes (espeically important when there are two texts by, say, milton, with differeing views) -in the bibliography at the back only the most recent edition is given. but this is nonetheless a very useful book.
it should be added that this review pertains to the 1st edition of 1979, while this one has a revised bibliography & new introduction, but i imagine they are largely the same.
