The Classical Heritage And Its Beneficiaries
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
For over a millennium, the towering edifice of Greco-Roman civilisation cast its long shadow across the intellectual and cultural landscape of Western Europe, and R. R. Bolgar's The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries presents a magisterial account of precisely how that inheritance was received, transformed, and ultimately institutionalised. Tracing the transmission of classical learning from the fall of Rome through to the Renaissance, this landmark scholarly work chronicles the ways in which Greek and Latin texts were copied, translated, taught, and reinterpreted by successive generations of educators, theologians, poets, and philosophers, arguing convincingly that the classical tradition was never a passive legacy but an active, contested, and continuously reinvented force. Bolgar writes with the assured authority of a historian deeply immersed in his subject, marshalling an impressive breadth of evidence — from monastic scriptoria to humanist academies — to illustrate how classical texts shaped the curricula, languages, and moral frameworks of medieval and Renaissance Europe. His meticulous analysis of the channels through which this knowledge flowed — through Byzantium, the Arab world, and the Latin West — reveals a story of cultural resilience far more complex and surprising than the familiar narrative of classical revival would suggest. A cornerstone of the history of ideas, this work leaves the reader with a profound and unsettling question: if the ancients shaped the modern mind so decisively, how much of our own thought remains, even now, their unacknowledged inheritance?
Author: R. R. Bolgar
Format: Paperback
Genre: History of arts
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
For over a millennium, the towering edifice of Greco-Roman civilisation cast its long shadow across the intellectual and cultural landscape of Western Europe, and R. R. Bolgar's The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries presents a magisterial account of precisely how that inheritance was received, transformed, and ultimately institutionalised. Tracing the transmission of classical learning from the fall of Rome through to the Renaissance, this landmark scholarly work chronicles the ways in which Greek and Latin texts were copied, translated, taught, and reinterpreted by successive generations of educators, theologians, poets, and philosophers, arguing convincingly that the classical tradition was never a passive legacy but an active, contested, and continuously reinvented force. Bolgar writes with the assured authority of a historian deeply immersed in his subject, marshalling an impressive breadth of evidence — from monastic scriptoria to humanist academies — to illustrate how classical texts shaped the curricula, languages, and moral frameworks of medieval and Renaissance Europe. His meticulous analysis of the channels through which this knowledge flowed — through Byzantium, the Arab world, and the Latin West — reveals a story of cultural resilience far more complex and surprising than the familiar narrative of classical revival would suggest. A cornerstone of the history of ideas, this work leaves the reader with a profound and unsettling question: if the ancients shaped the modern mind so decisively, how much of our own thought remains, even now, their unacknowledged inheritance?