Yale Press Log

Happy 444th Birthday, Will!

"When we are born we cry that we are come... to this great stage of fools," William Shakespeare once wrote. Well, 444 years ago today, Shakespeare entered this great stage of fools and made a little more sense out of it. To learn about how he did this, check out the wide array of Yale Press titles about the Bard, including Shakespeare the Thinker by A. D. Nuttall.

Nuttall’s profound and elegantly written study of Shakespeare’s thought is a literary tour de force, a marvelous inquiry into the questions that engrossed the playwright throughout his life. Nuttall investigates the dynamic nature of Shakespeare’s evolving answers and provides for twenty-first-century readers an unparalleled guide to Shakespeare’s plays.

Click here for an extended question & answer discussion with Nuttall. View the table of contents or read an excerpt.

To read Shakespeare's words as they should be read, Yale Press offers the Annotated Shakespeare series. Judith McGowan from the American Association of School Librarians says, "The volumes in this series will enrich any library that stocks editions of individual Shakespeaean plays."

Through the Annotated Shakespeare series, today’s readers have immediate access to the tools they need to help them better comprehend the plays of Shakespeare and explore their many possible interpretations. Each volume includes an informative introduction by the editor, Burton Raffel, a critical essay by Harold Bloom, and comprehensive on-page annotations that assist with vocabulary, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. Handsome and affordable, these paperback editions invite every reader to get to know—or become reacquainted with—the genius of Shakespeare.

NYT on professions and recessions: Sennett and Fraser

Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Lewis Hyde reviewed The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. He explains the book's ideas, saying that he enjoyed "the companionship of its inquiring intelligence." Hyde goes on to tell the readers, "There is much to learn here." Read the entire review here.

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than "skilled manual labor," Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman's work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

Click here to listen to an interview with Richard Sennett on the Yale Press Podcast. View the table of contents, or read an excerpt from The Craftsman.

In an article on Wall Street-bound graduates and their nervousness about the recession, Louise Story of the New York Times asked Yale Press author Steve Fraser. Fraser, author of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, also teaches an undergraduate seminar on Wall Street at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the beginning of the semester, Mr. Fraser noticed that students seemed to think the housing crisis was unrelated to their goals in finance and was caused mostly by irresponsible borrowers. But after the collapse of Bear Sterns, he said, they had "a great deal more sympathy for people who have already been affected by this crisis.

"There’s a sense in the class now that things are more worrying, that this may affect them."

Read the entire New York Times article here. Click here to listen to an interview with Fraser on the Yale Press Podcast.

"Elegant and erudite," Harkness' Jewel House is a gem

In an enthusiastic review in the American Scientist, history professor Anthony Grafton praised Deborah E. Harkness and her book The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. Grafton says, "She has charted the local and cosmopolitan worlds of science in Elizabethan London with a learning, precision and intelligence that compel admiration. Like the instrument makers who nested near St. Paul's, moreover, she has crafted a shiny, complex and effective new analytical mechanism—one that may well transform the practices of historians of early modern science, if others can muster the courage and energy to follow her example and analyze in similar depth and detail the scientific worlds of Florence, Nuremberg, Antwerp and Paris."

This captivating book is the first to focus on the array of ordinary men and women who shared a keen interest in nature and scientific inquiry in Elizabethan London. Throughout the vibrant city, lawyers, prisoners, midwives, merchants, and others developed the tools and techniques, as well as the collaborative yet contentious culture, that became the hallmarks of the Scientific Revolution.

Read an excerpt, or view the table of contents.

Panel at Yale in honor of Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker

Shakespeare's inner thought process will be the subject of a panel discussion held at Yale tomorrow, October 30. "Shakespeare the Thinker" will be at 4:30 p.m., in the Yale Center for British Art Lecture Hall, 1080 Chapel Street. The panel is free and open to the public.

Among the notable panelists are literary critic Harold Bloom and Connecticut Poet Laureate John Hollander. The event is hosted by Yale University Press, the Yale Center for British Art and the Whitney Humanities Center.

According to the Yale University Office of Public Affairs, the event was organized in honor of the late A. D. Nuttall and the recent publication of his book, Shakespeare the Thinker.

A. D. Nuttall’s study of Shakespeare’s intellectual preoccupations is a literary tour de force and comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar. Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity and relation, the proper status of imagination, ethics and subjectivity, language and its capacity to occlude and to communicate. Yet Shakespeare’s thought, Nuttall demonstrates, is anything but static. The plays keep returning to, modifying, and complicating his creative preoccupations. Nuttall allows us to hear and appreciate the emergent cathedral choir of play speaking to play. By the later stages of Nuttall’s book this choir is nearly overwhelming in its power and dimensions. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get at the distinctive essence of each work.

Read an excerpt, or view the table of contents.

For more information about the panel discussion, click here or contact Manana Sikic at 203 432-0673.

NYT: Tapestry in the Baroque is "stupefying" and "awesome"

In today's New York Times, Holland Cotter lauded "Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor," a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cotter called the exhibition "awesome in its exacting detail" and "a demonstration of beauty of a very particular and surprisingly personal kind." The epic tapestries, she says, are "a form of art you can care about in some personal way."

Thomas P. Campbell, who curated the show at the Met, also edited the catalog raisonne, Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, recently released by Yale University Press. In her review, Cotter calls the exhibition catalog "seven pounds of pure information."

Conceived as a sequel to the critically acclaimed Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002), this lavishly illustrated volume is the first comprehensive survey of 17th-century European tapestry available in English. From the Middle Ages until the late 18th century, European courts expended vast sums on tapestries, which were made with precious materials after designs by the leading artists of the day. Yet, this spectacular medium is still often presented as a decorative art of lesser importance. Tapestry in the Baroque challenges this notion, demonstrating that tapestry remained among the most prestigious figurative mediums throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, prized by the rich for its artistry and as a propaganda tool.

The book features forty-five of the finest surviving examples from collections in more than fifteen countries, as well as a number of related designs and oil sketches. Through these it examines the stylistic developments of tapestry between 1590 and 1720, when such masters as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Simon Vouet, Charles Le Brun, Pietro da Cortona, and Giovanni Romanelli responded to the challenges and opportunities of the medium in the context of contemporary artistic developments.

Read the full New York Times Review.

Yale University Press author wins 2007 Otto Gründler Prize

Charles B. McClendon's book The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600-900 has won the 2007 Otto Gründler Prize sponsored by Western Michigan University.

Presented at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Otto Gründler Prize is awarded to the author of a book or monograph judged by the selection committee as an outstanding contribution to the field. It has become a major international prize for scholarship in the area of medieval studies. The Medieval's Institute's Congress attracts some 3,000 scholars from around the globe to Western Michigan University each May, making it one of the largest medieval studies events in the world. For more details on this year's 42nd annual Congress and The Medieval Institute, please click here.

Published by Yale University Press, The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600-900 draws on rich documentary evidence and archaeological data, demonstrating that medieval Romanesque and Gothic churches owe much more to the architectural achievements of the Early Middle Ages than has been thought. Charles B. McClendon, a distinguished historian of architecture, examines the transformation of the Early Christian basilica from 600 to 900 A.D. McClendon is the author of The Imperial Abbey of Farfa: Architectural Currents of the Early Middle Ages, also published by Yale University Press.

Yale University presents 24-hr Shakespeare Marathon

A 24-hr Shakespeare marathon, the first of its kind at Yale Unversity, will be held this weekend at the Old Campus. According to the Yale Daily News, a full reading of all of his 39 plays, 5 narrative poems and 154 sonnets will be performed and read on campus. A similar marathon was peformed at Wellesley College in 2004 and several Yale students who attended the even decided to bring the project to New Haven. Taking place in four classrooms on Old Campus, the event is open to the public and participation is encouraged.

Released last week by Yale University Press, A.D. Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker is hot on the heels of this one-of-a-kind event.  A. D. Nuttall's profound and elegantly written study of Shakespeare's thought is a literary tour de force, a marvelous inquiry into the questions that engrossed the playwright throughout his life. Nuttall investigates the dynamic nature of Shakespeare's evolving answers and provides for twenty-first-century readers an unparalleled guide to Shakespeare's plays.

For full text of the Yale Daily News article, written by contributing reporter Rebecca Arzoian, click here.

Set in Stone

Roberta Smith reviewed "Set in Stone: The Medieval Face in Sculpture" in the New York Times today. The exhibit is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will run until February 18, 2007.

From the review:

“Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture" is one of those revelatory close-ups at which the Metropolitan Museum of Art excels. The show brings together similar objects that are not so much little seen as little noticed, and proceeds to make you notice them, big time. It touches on history, connoisseurship, artistic discovery and the latest attributions and research techniques, the latter involving the geochemical matching of limestone isotopes. And the primary vehicle for this excursion is that most profoundly familiar yet persistently engaging motif, the human face.

"The world glimpsed in this show is Europe in the 12th, 13th and early 14th centuries, when the Romanesque style was giving way to Gothic, as reflected in about 70 heads and related objects, in carved stone, wood and metal. These have been assembled by Charles T. Little and Wendy A. Stein, who are, respectively, curator and research associate in the Met’s department of medieval art and the Cloisters. Mr. Little has also edited the show’s excellent catalog.

Read the rest of the review here.

Palladio's Rome

"With [Thomas] Jefferson I conversed at length on the subject of architecture -- Palladio, he said, 'was the Bible -- you should get it and stick close to it.'" - Colonel Isaac A. Coles, 1816

Andrea di Pietro della Gondola (1508-1580)--better known by the name Palladio, after the Greek goddess of wisdom Pallas Athena--was one of the greatest architects of the High Renaissance. Much beloved for the churches, villas, and palaces that bear the refined "Palladian" style, Palladio also published in 1554 two enormously popular guides to the churches and antiquities of Rome. Striving to be both scholarly and popular, Palladio's guidebooks invited his Renaissance readers to discover the charm of Rome's ancient and medieval wonders and to follow pilgrimage routes leading from one church to the next.

Modern visitors or pilgrims to the "City of Wonders" can now enjoy Rome exactly as their predecessors did 450 years ago. Palladio's Rome provides, for the first time to an English-speaking audience, an English translation of Palladio's two guidebooks in a single volume, pocket-sized just like the originals. The book is enhanced with period illustrations, contemporary photographs, and learned commentary, as well as the first full English translation of Raphael's famous letter to Pope Leo X on the monuments of ancient Rome.

"A fascinating snapshot of Rome a century before the Baroque architects got their hands on it, this two-fer is also a surprising self-portrait of the artist," says Richard B. Woodward in the New York Times. "Palladio celebrated the supremacy of reason in his designs, adapted worldwide during the centuries since, often for secular contexts. And yet like many a Renaissance genius, he was also a deeply faithful and conventional Catholic."

The End Justifies the Green

What do The Godfather, The Cat in the Hat, and Machiavelli's The Prince have in common? According to Stanley Bing in this weekend's Wall Street Journal, they are among the five books that offer the soundest advice for proper business etiquette.

Before your eyes roll too far into the back of your head, consider what Bing has to say about Machiavelli's The Prince (1513):

Masquerading as a philosophical treatise in support of a strong senior executive, this book is actually a road map for ruthless narcissists -- the kind who do very well because their primary concern at all times is Numero Uno. Machiavelli discovered a central truth that leads to business success: Moral concerns have very little utility in the day-to-day conduct of successful management. No, it's not a nice book. It advises all kinds of pre-emptive murder and destruction of one's enemies and, when necessary, of one's friends. But an embrace of its world view has been at the center of virtually all executive success since the beginning of time. What Machiavelli did was to make the tactics of the big guys available to anybody who cared to consider them. A firm grasp of his tenets creates a business etiquette that is at once cool, polite, thoughtful, strategic and brutal.

On that note, Yale University Press would like ruthlessly to promote its recent edition of The Prince.  Angelo M. Codevilla offers a translation uniquely faithful to the original and especially sensitive to the author's use of verbal imprecision, including puns, double meanings, and the subjunctive mood. The translation is accompanied by three critical essays that explore some of the most important ways The Prince clashes with the other main branch of Western civilization, the Socratic and Judeo-Christian traditions.

Yale Books for the Holidays

Four Yale University Press titles appear in the New York Times Book Review Holiday Books issue. 

• Stephen Heller calls Masters of American Comics, “a smartly designed, comprehensive history of 20th-century comics.”  Read the full review.
• Looking at Atget is included in a selection of recent books evoking a romantic vision of Paris. Read the review.
• Robert Sullivan writes a full-length review of Tom Lewis’ The Hudson.
• In a full-length feature, Liesl Schillinger calls Shopping in the Renaissance “meticulously researched and elegantly illustrated.”

"The Exhibition of a Lifetime"

"Pinch yourself," says Roberta Smith in the New York Times, "The Metropolitan Museum's sublime exhibition of the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico is not a dream, much less a heavenly vision. Sure, its images are populated by figures with halos, wings or both. And yes, these motifs create a veritable mirage of grace and elegance, color and light, serenity and perfect form. But this show is entirely, memorably real. It brings the work of a beloved artist, long mythologized as a modest, devout Dominican friar who painted with divine guidance, solidly down to earth."

The exhibition runs through January 29th. The catalog is published by Yale University Press, in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.