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Five hundred years ago, working from hints in classical Greek and Latin poets, the young author Jacopo Sannazaro crafted the book called Arcadia, a narrative in richly descriptive Italian prose interwoven with elegant and passionate poems. A young man—transparently a stand-in for the author—leaves his home in Naples to join a community of shepherds in the remote Greek region of Arcadia. Yet he finds that this seemingly idyllic land is as fraught as the homeland he fled. Like the author’s humanist community in Naples, ravaged in the fifteenth century by invasion and regime change, the eloquent shepherd-poets of Arcadia are driven to distraction and depression by the frustrations of desire and the social unrest that threatens their pastoral lives. Amidst all that, they tell each other their personal histories and share their sorrows in song.
Sannazaro’s Arcadia is widely recognized as a foundational text of pastoral poetry, humanism, and Italian literature. But the book itself has been largely inaccessible to English-language students and readers. This new translation uses contemporary American English to convey Arcadia’s youthful vigor, narrative energy, and poetic inventiveness. The extensive introduction and commentaries place Arcadia in the context of late fifteenth-century humanist thought and writing, as well as the complicated crisis of Naples in the years just before 1500. This translation is designed to facilitate the re-entry of Arcadia into scholarly discourse and general readership while outlining its lasting cultural influence on poetry, drama, art and music.

An invitation to engage with some of today’s most respected science journalists as they take readers beneath the surface to reveal the making of eleven of the best science stories.

With eleven deeply reported, artfully crafted stories and annotations by some of the most thoughtful and respected science journalists working today, The Best Science Stories and How They Work is more than the sum of its impressive parts. Experience the pleasure of reading a “Best of” anthology, attending a science writing masterclass, and meeting journalists who become more than their familiar bylines. Each piece benefits from an introduction, annotations, and a conversation between the piece’s author and annotator.

 Siri Carpenter—editor of this book and cofounder of The Open Notebook, a leading source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science—has long considered what’s behind the best writing. The pieces in this guide are drawn from a range of publications such as Scientific American, Nature, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine and offer a unique perspective on how great science journalism happens: the careful structuring of a narrative, the delicate balance of skepticism and wonder, the ethical challenges of working with sources, the artistry of prose that sings. Readers will not only encounter outstanding examples of stellar storytelling, but they will also understand how these successful stories were reported and written, revealing the choices fundamental to good science journalism. Following each annotation, a Q&A with the original author provides an intimate look at the decisions and challenges that shaped their work.

Taken together, these pieces and annotations reveal the detailed, technical narrative work required to tell science stories. The book will delight, inspire, and equip readers with new tools to appreciate the stories that matter most.

Contributors: Jordana Cepelewicz, Shraddha Chakradhar, Nadia Drake, Ben Goldfarb, Sabrina Imbler, Ferris Jabr, Emily Laber-Warren, Stephanie M. Lee, Dana Mackenzie, Amy Maxmen, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Kendra Pierre-Louis, Debbie Ponchner, Sandeep Ravindran, Mary Roach, Paola Rosa-Aquino, Ashley Smart, Jessica Seigel, Ramin Skibba, Kamala Thiagarajan, Bijal Trivedi, and Ed Yong
 

The Hibernensis is the longest and most comprehensive canon-law text to have circulated in Carolingian Europe. Compiled in Ireland in the late seventh or early eighth century, it exerted a strong and long-lasting influence on the development of European canon law. The present edition offers—for the first time—a complete text of the Hibernensis combining the two main branches of its manuscript transmission. This is accompanied by an English translation and a commentary that is both historical and philological. The Hibernensis is an invaluable source for those interested in church history, the history of canon law, social-economic history, as well as intellectual history, and the history of the book.

Widely recognized as the single most important source for the history of the church in early medieval Ireland, the Hibernensis is also our best index for knowing what books were available in Ireland at the time of its compilation: it consists of excerpted material from the Bible, Church Fathers and doctors, hagiography, church histories, chronicles, wisdom texts, and insular normative material unattested elsewhere. This in addition to the staple sources of canonical collections, comprising the acta of church councils and papal letters. Altogether there are forty-two cited authors and 135 cited texts. But unlike previous canonical collections, the contents of the Hibernensis are not simply derivative: they have been modified and systematically organised, offering an important insight into the manner in which contemporary clerical scholars attempted to define, interpret, and codify law for the use of a growing Christian society.