English Renaissance

The dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral of Florence, is among the most enduring symbols of the Renaissance, an equal to the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Its designer was Filippo Brunelleschi, a temperamental architect and inventor who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. Yet the completion of the dome was not Brunelleschi’s glory alone. He was forced to share the commission with his archrival, the canny and gifted sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti.

Daughter of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, Katherine has been fated her whole life to marry Prince Arthur of England. When they meet and are married, the match becomes as passionate as it is politically expedient. The young lovers revel in each other’s company and plan the England they will make together. But tragically, aged only 15, Arthur falls ill and extracts from his 16-year-old bride a deathbed promise to marry his brother, Henry; become queen; and fulfill their dreams and her destiny.

The New York Times bestselling author of the Six Tudor Queens series explores the private side of the legendary king Henry VIII and his dramatic and violent reign in this extraordinary historical novel. Young Henry began his rule as a magnificent and chivalrous Renaissance prince who embodied every virtue. He had all the qualities to make a triumph of his rule, yet we remember only the violence. Henry famously broke with the Pope, founding the Church of England and launching a religious revolution that divided his kingdom. He beheaded two of his wives and cast aside two others.

A dazzling and ambitious history of the pre-Columbian Atlantic seas, Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.

Bristol in 1787 is booming, a city where power beckons those who dare to take risks. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs capital and a well-connected wife. Marriage to Frances Scott is a mutually convenient solution. Trading her social contacts for Josiah's protection, Frances finds her life and fortune dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, rum, and slaves. Into her new world comes Mehuru, once a priest in the ancient African kingdom of Yoruba, now a slave in England.

Perfect for fans of Patrick O'Brian, Bernard Cornwell and swashbuckling adventure during the great Age of Sail: To the Eastern Seas is the 22nd novel in Julian Stockwin's acclaimed Thomas Kydd series. With Bonaparte held to a stalemate in Europe, the race to empire is now resumed. Britain's ambitions turn to the Spice Islands, the Dutch East Indies, where Admiral Pellew has been sent to confront the enemy's vastly rich holdings in these tropical islands. Captain Sir Thomas Kydd joins reinforcements to snatch these for the British Crown.

Jacob Fugger lived in Germany at the turn of the 16th century, the grandson of a peasant. By the time he died, his fortune amounted to nearly 2 percent of European GDP. Not even John D. Rockefeller had that kind of wealth. Most people become rich by spotting opportunities, pioneering new technologies, or besting opponents in negotiations. Fugger did all that, but he had an extra quality that allowed him to rise even higher: nerve.

Sixteenth-century Europe was a time of destabilization of age-old norms and the waging of religious wars - yet it also witnessed the remarkable flowering of a pacific culture cultivated by a cohort of extraordinary women rulers who sat on Europe's thrones, most notably Mary Tudor; Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Catherine de' Medici.

In the autumn of 1558, church bells across England ring out the joyous news that Elizabeth I is the new queen, yet one woman hears the tidings with utter dread. She is Amy Dudley, wife of Sir Robert, and she knows Elizabeth’s ambitious leap to the throne will draw her husband back to the center of the glamorous Tudor court, where he was born to be. Elizabeth has inherited a bankrupt country where treason is rampant and foreign war a certainty. Her advisors warn her that she will survive only if she marries a strong prince to govern the rebellious country. She desires Robert Dudley.

The daughter of a wealthy merchant, Anneke Sheldrake suddenly finds her family bankrupted when her father’s ship is swept away at sea. Forced to find a way to provide for herself and her siblings, Anneke rejects an offer of marriage from a despised cousin and instead turns to her late mother’s family business – brewing ale. Armed with her mother’s recipes, she then makes a bold deal with her father’s aristocratic employer, putting her home and family at risk.

It was the splendor and the scandal of the age. In 1506, the ferociously ambitious Renaissance Pope Julius II tore down the most sacred shrine in Europe, the millennium-old St. Peter's Basilica built by the Emperor Constantine over the apostle's grave, to build a better basilica.

Palermo 1632: Giulia is thirteen when she learns her mother's greatest secret: Teofania makes an undetectable, slow-acting, lethal poison—Acqua Tofana—which she uses to free the broken and abused women of Palermo. Now Teofania wants to pass her recipe on to her daughter, and Giulia soon realizes that in a time when women have no voice, justice is sometimes best served in a cup of wine or broth.

In true stories as vivid as the colors in which they painted, Jim Weiss brings to life the astounding Leonardo da Vinci; the volcanic genius Michelangelo; Brunelleschi, who changed the way we see the world; the lighthearted sculptor, Donatello; and other captivating characters. You will watch fierce Pope Julius II drive out invaders while supervising the painting of the Sistine Chapel, and dine in the palace of Lorenzo de Medici, swordsman, statesman and patron of the arts, as he faces treachery and turns war to peace.

Winter, 1553. Pursued by the Inquisition, Hannah Green, a 14-year-old Jewish girl, is forced to flee with her father from their home in Spain. But Hannah is no ordinary refugee; she has the gift of “Sight”, the ability to foresee the future, priceless in the troubled times of the Tudor court.

Emily Waverly is the overlooked second daughter of the prestigious Viscount Waverly. She is plain, having little to no hope of securing a suitable marriage prospect unlike her two beautiful sisters. However, when her childhood friend Lord Tristan returns from studies abroad in other to take over the family business, Emily is left stunned when he repeatedly comes after her leaving her sisters and other spinsters in the community angered. Will Emily be able to look past her self doubt and allow herself fall in love?

Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo began work on a painting that became one of the most famous pieces of art in the world - the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Every year millions of people come to see Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, which is the largest fresco painting on earth in the holiest of Christianity's chapels; yet there is not one single Christian image in this vast, magnificent artwork.

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia - three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man's perceptions - and the course of Western history.

When the predator becomes the prey… blood will run in the gutters of Tudor London. Myles Devereux rules the streets. A ruthless gangster in the lawless underbelly of Tudor London, he controls the brothels, the taverns, the enforcers—and everyone knows not to cross him. But someone just did. His bookkeeper turns up dead. His debtors are being picked off one by one. And now the sheriff’s men are at his door, accusing him of the murders. Then Richard Fitzwarren, the Queen’s cold-eyed emissary, brings worse: a heresy charge—and death by fire This is no random attack. It’s a setup. ...

When Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems - but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition. This volume presents the 1855 "Leaves of Grass" in its entirety, unchanged, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman.

Winter 1474 finds Nicholas exiled in the frozen port of Danzig, Poland. His Machiavellian exploits in Scotland have cost him friends and family—not to mention countless riches. As the ice melts, temptations arise. Will he assist the Muslim Prince Uzum Hasan against the Turks? Will he lose himself among the secret, scented gardens of the Crimea in the arms of a close friend's bride? As Nicholas pursues his future, his estranged wife, Gelis, seeks the truth about his past, only to discover the secret identity of his latest comrade in arms-a tantalizing ghost from the past.