The Essential Humanities Reader

The study of the Humanities is the study of what makes us human, which is a seemingly infinite and infinitely difficult subject. Most definitions of what make us human seem to break down or melt into definitions of other living beings. One thing that does seem to distinguish humans from other species is our attempt both to discuss the human condition and to record that discussion for future generations. The best of these recordings, which take various forms in arts and letters, help us to understand the world around us and to give it meaning. For this reason, people seeking answers to difficult questions tend to return century after century to these same readings. Selections from the Old Testament, Homer, Pericles, Plato, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, the New Testament, Medieval Song Tradition, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, Pico, Montaigne, Luther, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Cervantes, Donne, Marvell, Milton, Behn, Barker, Pope, Jefferson, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Darwin, Tennyson, Marx and Engels, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Maupassant, Freud, Gilman, Eliot, Owen, Stein, and Rogers.