Download or read book Plague and Pleasure written by Arthur White and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2014-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plague and Pleasure is a lively popular history that introduces a new hypothesis about the impetus behind the cultural change in Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance coincided with a period of chronic, constantly recurring plague, unremitting warfare and pervasive insecurity. Consequently, people felt a need for mental escape to alternative, idealized realities, distant in time or space from the unendurable present but made vivid to the imagination through literature, art, and spectacle.