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Article: Three Golden Ages: Discovering the Creative Secrets of Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England, and America's Founding
- Article from:
- The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
- Article date:
- July 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Virginia Historical Society 2000. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Three Golden Ages: Discovering the Creative Secrets of Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England, and America's Founding. By ALF J. MAPP, JR. Lanham, Md. and Oxford: Madison Books, 1998. xii, 657 pp.
THIS book asks a very big question: what explains the outburst of creative periods in history. Mapp purports to discover the secrets of three of the "world's great epochs in creativity" (p. 543): Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England, and the era of the founding of the United States. His main interest, as readers familiar with his previous work would expect, lies in the American era: accordingly, he devotes 100 pages to Renaissance Florence, 120 pages to Elizabethan England, and 304 pages ...