Bookplates are plates bearing a person's name, and often the Latin words ex libris used to attest the ownership of books, one of them being usually pasted inside the front cover of each book. Such plates are generally more or less of an artistic character, and may bear some heraldic, emblematic, or other device. They were first employed about the end of the fifteenth century, and had passed from popular use by the late 20th century Research Bookplates
Meal times in Britain have varied greatly over the years. In the fourteenth century breakfast was taken at five; dinner at nine and supper at four.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries breakfast had advanced to seven; dinner eleven and supper six. Towards the end of the sixteenth century dinner advanced to midday. Research Meal Times
A nation is a body of people, organised into a single state. One of the most characteristic of the ideas of the Age of the Renaissance was that of the Nation and its sovereign independence - an idea still very active in our own days. The Middle Ages had been dominated by the Catholic ideal of world unity. The great institutions of those ages were international - for example, the Feudal System, and above all the Church and the Papacy. Latin, too, was an international language; and though the various peoples had their own languages, the continual use of Latin in both Church and State affairs helped educated men to regard themselves as members of one society, the society of Christendom. Above all, these peoples - English, French, Spanish, Italian, German - were all members of one Church. All belonged in some measure to the Christendom of which the heads were the Pope and the Emperor. Then, gradually, from the early days of the Renaissance, the newer idea of the 'Nation' took root, and this in time changed the unity of 'Christendom' into the disunion of 'Europe'.
Modern Europe is dominated by national feeling and is divided into independent national states; and these have no longer even the common bond of one Church. Europe has lost as well as gained by the disappearance of medieval Christendom. She has gained, because the old feudal divisions in most countries meant internal disunion, civil warfare, and baronial tyranny. But Europe has also lost, because the old ideal of a united Christendom has disappeared in the jealous rivalries of warring nations. From time to time attempts have been made to check these dangerous rivalries. But the problem of international peace and co-operation - of a 'society of nations' - is one which mankind is still trying to solve in a satisfactory manner. The nations which took the lead in Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were those that first achieved national unity, and the chief of these were France, Spain, and England. Italy, which had given so much to the world in art and letters, did not share in this political change. Great men lived in Italy - in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and Milan - but all these cities were the capitals of small states. In short, Italy was not a nation; hence she became from 1494 the prey of powerful neighbours. As with Italy, so with Germany.
The Holy Roman Empire was an empire only in name; in practice, Germany contained three or four hundred separate States. Both Germany and Italy retained, until even the nineteenth century, their internal divisions and discords. France, Spain, and England had achieved national unity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whereas Germany and Italy had to wait another three centuries - and some of our problems to-day are due to the fact that they are still comparatively new nations. The means by which national unity was brought about in France, Spain, and England was the monarchy. It was their kings who saved and made these countries - saved them from feudal anarchy and made them into nations. It was monarchs like Henry VII and Henry VIII of England, Louis XI and Francis I of France, and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain who united their countries under a strong rule, and led them to a great destiny. A Holy Roman Emperor (Maximilian) contrasted the new monarchs with himself as follows: 'The Emperor is indeed a king of kings, for no one feels bound to obey him; and the King of Spain is a king of men, for, though resisted, he is still obeyed; but the King of France is a king of beasts, for him none dare gainsay.' Research Nation
The Renaissance was that change in the outlook of Europe which took place during the centuries from the fourteenth to the sixteenth. In its broadest sense the Renaissance affected every department of human life. But in its narrower sense it refers to the revival of the learning of ancient Greece, and to the effects of that revival on the arts and literature of modern peoples. The Church in the Middle Ages had taught men to revere authority and to find in her teaching an answer to all the problems of life, whereas the Greeks taught men to inquire and to explore rather than to accept, and to enjoy rather than to suffer. It was this attitude of mind, more than anything else, which shook the medieval world to its foundations. The views of the ancient Greeks, now re-born into the world, were in sharp contrast with the ideals of the Middle Ages. From these ideals many men for a time turned with a feeling of contempt.
The Renaissance was a many-sided movement: it deeply influenced learning and education, art and architecture, science and invention, geography and exploration, and, above all, religion. After the fall of Rome, a knowledge of Greek had rapidly died out in the West and no provision was made for its teaching similar to that made for Latin. In Italy, owing to the closeness of its relations with the East, the number of scholars, monks, and others, who learnt some Greek was greater than elsewhere. It is not, surprising, therefore, that the revival of learning received its main impulse from Italy. From the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Italian scholars became more and more devoted to ancient studies, and they began to visit Constantinople, where Greek learning had been preserved. There they hunted out, copied, and eagerly studied the precious manuscripts of the past, and these opened up a new world of thought. Further, from the time that the Turks' crossed from Asia into Europe, some of the Greeks themselves began to travel westwards and to accept well-paid teaching posts in the wealthy Italian cities. And, though the revival began in Italy, the new ideas were rapidly circulated by the new printing presses invented at the time, and every nation in due course played its part in the Renaissance.
The great and wealthy city of Florence was the centre of the Italian Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici, a merchant prince who became ruler of the city, was a patron of the New Learning, and he encouraged Greek scholars to settle in Florence. His grandson, Lorenzo de Medici, known as The Magnificent, loved to gather round him the learned men of the day; he spent 60,000 pounds a year on books; and he caused 200 rare manuscripts to be brought from the East to the Medici library. Rome was second only to Florence as a centre of the New Learning. The Popes themselves became great patrons of learning. Nicholas V founded the Vatican Library. When the son of Lorenzo de Medici became Pope as Leo X, the Renaissance in Rome reached its highest point. Leo made Rome, as he said, ' the capital of the world in literature, as it is in everything else'. He provided a hundred professors for his Greek college in Rome, and he brought his father's library to the Holy City. The library was afterwards restored to Florence by his cousin Clement VII, another member of this remarkable Medici family. The New Learning influenced England from the time of Edward IV, and it made great headway in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII when the scholars known as the Oxford Reformers were flourishing.
The first Englishman to bring Greek manuscripts to England was William Selling. One of his pupils was Thomas Linacre, who went to Florence and shared the instruction given to the young Medici princes; he read in the Vatican Library, and made the acquaintance of Aldo at Venice. Another Oxford teacher who drew his inspiration from Italian sources was William Grocyn, one of the first men to give lectures on Greek literature at his University.
One of Grocyn's pupils was John Colet, who visited Italy in 1496 and returned to lecture on the Gospels in the Greek original at Oxford. He and Sir Thomas More, were friends of Erasmus, a Dutch scholar of international fame. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, was herself a patroness of the New Learning. She founded two Cambridge colleges, Christ's and St. John's, and two Lady Margaret Professorships of Divinity, one at Oxford and one at Cambridge. The Revival of Learning was one aspect of the Renaissance; the outburst of artistic energy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was another. The painters of the new period broke away from the conventional art of the Middle Ages and began again to draw from living models. As with the artists, so with the sculptors. Donatello 'went straight with his mighty chisel to original sources - to youth and manhood, and the love of living'. The great figures of that age - Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian - still dominate the history of European art. Examples of their works, and of many other Italian artists of the Renaissance, as well as of the Northern artists - Holbein, Durer, and others - are to be seen in the magnificent collection at the National Gallery.
It was natural that men who sought their inspiration from the Greeks should turn with renewed interest to classical architecture. The ruins of ancient Rome provided examples ready to hand; and soon churches planned like classical temples were rising in every city in Italy. St. Peter's, Rome, was designed by Bramante, and the famous dome added by Michelangelo. But great as was the enthusiasm for this architecture Renaissance architecture did not establish itself in England until the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, though Henry VII's tomb at WestminsterAbbey is an example of the Florentine art of the period.
The Renaissance period, filled as it was with a love of experiment, naturally produced a renewed interest in science. With the exception of isolated geniuses like Friar Roger Bacon, there were no medieval scientists worthy of the name. Practically no scientific discoveries had been made for centuries. Modern Science begins its history with the Renaissance and owes a good deal to Leonardo da Vinci. He was the first of a long line of experimenters whose work has continued to the present day. The greatest shock to the medieval notions of the universe was given by Copernicus. For two thousand years mankind with few exceptions had believed that the earth was the centre of the universe, and that the sun revolved round our planet every twenty-four hours. Such had been the teaching of Ptolemy, the Greek scientist. Another Greek, Pythagoras, had questioned it, and advanced the extraordinary notion that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of the universe; but there were few who accepted his theory until Copernicus turned his attention to the 'solar system'. Through slits cut in the walls of his house, Copernicus watched the movements of the planets. Just before he died in 1543 he published a book - 'The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies' - giving to the world the results of his observations.
Twenty years later the famous Galileo was born at Pisa, and it was he who perfected the telescope. He lived to popularise the theory of Copernicus, but he was nearly put to death for his pains and was forced by the Court of Inquisition to recant. The Italian Galileo, and the English Newton who discovered the laws of gravity, were the two greatest scientists of the seventeenth century. In the realm of geographical discovery, no age in the world' s history was more momentous than the Age of the Renaissance. Columbus, who discovered America; Vasco De Gama, who found the Cape Route to India; Cabot, Cartier, and Cortez, the discoverers of Newfoundland, Canada, and Mexico; Balboa, who first sailed on the Pacific; Magellan, whose ship was the first to sail round the world - all these and many more make the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an era without parallel in the annals of discovery.
The new ideas which came surging into the world during the Renaissance acted in many respects as disruptive forces. This was particularly true in the realm of religion. An unquestioning acceptance of authority - i.e. of the teaching of the Catholic Church - was the keynote of the medieval attitude to life, but an eager, inquiring generation began to question this attitude. Men, too, were shocked by the moral decay of the Church and of the Papacy; voices were raised demanding reforms. Some reformers, like Colet and Erasmus, tried to reconcile the new ideas with the Church of Rome and worked to reform it; others, of whom Luther was the greatest, rejected altogether its authority.
The revolution in European history known as the Reformation was an indirect result of the Renaissance - of the New Learning which invited comparison between the present and the past; of the invention of printing which scattered broadcast the new ideas; and again, of the growing idea of the Nation and with it the supremacy of the State. Research Renaissance
Suffrage is the right to express an opinion by voting on political questions, applied in particular to the right to vote at parliamentary elections.
Restricted suffrage was the rule in America until well into the 19th century. Massachusetts and New Haven colonies for a time gave the suffrage to none but church members. In most of the colonies a freehold qualification prevailed, sometimes the 'forty-shilling freehold' of English law, sometimes a freehold of so many acres.
The constitutions made in the Revolutionary period mostly provided for the former in the Northern States, for the latter in the Southern, while New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Georgia had simply a requirement of tax-paying. The Constitution of 1787 left this matter entirely to the States, allowing all to vote for Congressmen in a given State who could vote for the members of the State House of Representatives. After 1789, the influence of democratic principles led to the abolition of property qualifications in Georgia in 1798; in Maryland in 1801 and 1809; in Massachusetts in 1821; in New York in 1821; in Delaware in 1831; in New Jersey in 1844; in Connecticut in 1845; in Virginia in 1850; in North Carolina in 1854 and 1868; in South Carolina in 1865; in Rhode Island, except in some municipal elections, in 1888.
The FifteenthAmendment forbids any State, or the United States, to deny the suffrage to any citizen because of race, colour or previous condition of servitude. The new States have mostly provided for manhood suffrage from the first, often even for the suffrage of aliens in process of naturalization. Research Suffrage
The canary or canary-bird (Serinus canarius) is an insessorial singing bird of the finch family and native of the Canary islands. They were introduced to Europe in the latter part of the fifteenth century. Many of the caged canaries kept are actually mules produced from cross breeding a canary with an allied species such as the goldfinch, siskin or linnet. Research Canary
Domenico Beccafumi was an Italian painter. He was born in the latter half of the fifteenth century near Sienna and died in 1551. He enriched the churches of Sierma with many noble frescoes and other paintings. He drew and coloured well, and possessed strong inventive powers. Research Domenico Beccafumi
Isaac Disraeli was an English writer. He was born in 1766 at Enfield, Middlesex and died in 1848. He was the father of the well-known statesman, Benjamin Disraeli. His father, Benjamin Disraeli, a descendant of a family of Spanish Jews which had settled at Venice in the fifteenth century to escape the Inquisition, came over to England in 1748 and made a large fortune. Isaac Disraeli, however, showed a strong repugnance to conmicrce, and was finally permitted to follow his literary bent. An anonymous reply to Peter Pindar, entitled On the Abuse of Satire, was followed in 1791-1793 by the appearance of his Curiosities of Literature, the success of which determined much of his afterwork. His Essay on the Literary Character was published in 1795, and some time afterwards a volume of romantic tales, The Loves of Mejnoun and Leila. Between 1812 and 1822 appeared his Calamities of Authors, Quarrels of Authors, and Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James I; the three being afterwards published collectively under the title of Miscellanies of Literature. In 1828 appeared the commencement of his Life and Eeign of Charles I, a work completed in 1831. An affection of the eyes put an end to a projected life of Pope and a history of English Freethinkers, but in 1841 he published a selection from his manuscripts under the title of Amenities of Literature. Research Isaac Disraeli
James Buchanan was the fifteenth president of the USA from 1857 to 1861. He was born in 1791 at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania and died in 1868. After graduating from Dickinson college, Carlisle, Pennsylvania he studied law at Lancaster for two years and was admitted to the bar in 1812. He served in the lower house of the state legislature from 1814 to 1816 and from 1821 to 1831 in the US congress. As the chairman of the judiciary committee he conducted the 1830 impeachment trial of Judge H Peck. An anti-slavery supporter, he put his own political ambitions before his moral views, and compromised with the Southern States over slavery so as to not lose their support in his bid for President. Research James Buchanan
Johannes Bessarion was a titular patriarch of Constantinople and Greek scholar. He was born in 1389 or 1395 at Trebizond and died in 1472. He was made archbishop of Nicaea by John Palaeologus, whose efforts to unite the Greek and Roman churches he seconded in such a way as to lose the esteem of his countrymen and gain that of PopeEugenius IV, who made him cardinal. He held various important posts, and was twice nearly elected pope. The revival of letters in the fifteenth century owed not a little to his influence. He left translations of Aristotle and vindications of Plato, with valuable collections of books and manuscripts. Research Johannes Bessarion
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Bookplates
