Piety and Pythagoras in Renaissance Florence: The Symbolum Nesianum


Book Description

This volume sheds light on the transitions in the intellectual life of Renaissance Florence in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Its point of departure is a hitherto unedited Latin text, the Symbolum Nesianum, whose original version was written by Giovanni Nesi, a follower of the famous Platonist Marsilio Ficino and then of the austere, fiery reformer, Girolamo Savonarola. The first part of the book presents a lengthy introductory study that illuminates the text’s cultural context. The second part offers a critical edition, translation, and commentary for the text. The book will be of use to historians and to all scholars interested in the culture of the city often called the cradle of the Renaissance as it underwent one of its most difficult times.




Humanism, Theology, and Spiritual Crisis in Renaissance Florence: Giovanni Caroli’s Liber dierum lucensium


Book Description

This is the first work by Giovanni Caroli (1428–1503) to appear in print. Caroli was one of the leading theologians in Florence during the last decades of the fifteenth century, a man who lived between the two great traditions of his time: the scholastic and the humanist. The volume contains a critical edition of the Latin text, entitled The Book of My Days in Lucca, an English translation, commentary notes and an introduction. Caroli presents us with his powerful personal reaction to the institutional crisis regarding the required reform in the Dominican Order, yet even here we already notice the pervasive influence of his classical education, and especially his acquaintance with authors such as Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, and especially Virgil.




Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans


Book Description

In ancient tradition, Pythagoras emerges as a wise teacher, an outstanding mathematician, an influential politician, and as a religious and ethical reformer. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Pythagoras, Pythagoreanism, and the early Pythagoreans through an analysis of the many representations of the individual and his followers.




Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance


Book Description

This pioneering study reveals the central place held by Virgil's 'messianic' Eclogue in the art and literature of Renaissance Italy.




Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe


Book Description

This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.




Marsilio Ficino


Book Description

This volume consists of 21 essays on Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the great Florentine scholar, philosopher and priest who was the architect of Renaissance Platonism and whose long-lasting influence on philosophy, love and music theory, medicine and magic extended across Europe. Grouped into three sections, they cover such topics as priesthood, the influence of Hermetic monism, Plotinus and Augustine, Jewish transmission of the prisca theologia, the 15th c. Plato-Aristotle controversy, the soul and its afterlife, the primacy of the will, theriac and musical therapy, the notions of matter, seeds, mirrors and clocks, and other fascinating philosophical and theological issues. Also considered are Ficino’s critics, his relationship to the Camaldolese Order, his letters to princes, his influence on art, on Copernicus, on Chapman, and the nature of the Platonic Academy. Contributors include: Tamara Albertini, Michael J. B. Allen, Francis Ames-Lewis, Donald Beecher, Christopher S. Celenza, Stephen Clucas, Arthur Field, Hiroshi Hirai, Moshe Idel, Dilwyn Knox, Sergius Kodera, Jill Kraye, Dennis F. Lackner, Jörg Lauster, Anthony Levi, John Monfasani, Valery Rees, Clement Salaman, Peter Serracino-Inglott, M. Stéphane Toussaint, and Angela Voss.




Italian Literature Before 1900 in English Translation


Book Description

"Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation provides the most complete record possible of texts from the early periods that have been translated into English, and published between 1929 and 2008. It lists works from all genres and subjects, and includes translations wherever they have appeared across the globe. In this annotated bibliography, Robin Healey covers over 5,200 distinct editions of pre-1900 Italian writings. Most entries are accompanied by useful notes providing information on authors, works, translators, and how the translations were received. Among the works by over 1,500 authors represented in this volume are hundreds of editions by Italy's most translated authors - Dante Alighieri, [Niccoláo] Machiavelli, and [Giovanni] Boccaccio - and other hundreds which represent the author's only English translation. A significant number of entries describe works originally published in Latin. Together with Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature."--Pub. desc.




Setting Plato Straight


Book Description

In 'Setting Plato Straight', Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations.




Early Modern Art Theory. Visual Culture and Ideology, 1400-1700


Book Description

The development of art theory over the course of the Renaissance and Baroque eras is reflected in major stylistic shifts. In order to elucidate the relationship between theory and practice, we must consider the wider connections between art theory, poetic theory, natural philosophy, and related epistemological matrices. Investigating the interdisciplinary reality of framing art-making and interpretation, this treatment rejects the dominant synchronic approach to history and historiography and seeks to present anew a narrative that ties together various formal approaches, focusing on stylistic transformation in particular artist’s oeuvres – Michelangelo, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, Guido Reni, Poussin, and others – and the contemporary environments that facilitated them. Through the dual understanding of the art-theoretical concept of the Idea, an evolution will be revealed that illustrates the embittered battles over style and the overarching intellectual shifts in the period between art production and conceptualization based on Aristotelian and Platonic notions of creativity, beauty and the goal of art as an exercise in encapsulating the “divine” truth of nature.




The Jesuit Mission to New France


Book Description

A new interpretation of the Jesuit mission to New France is here proposed by using, for comparison and contrast, the earlier Jesuit experience in Japan. In order to present revisionist perspectives of the Jesuit missions based on a broader international framework beyond North America, the existing historical paradigms of the Jesuit missionary activity to Amerindians based on the limited regional history of New France are re-examined. The time period of analysis covers one entire century, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. The Jesuit evangelists used in this analysis include European, mainly Iberian and French, missionaries. The non-European converts dealt with in this discussion are Japanese and Amerindian peoples. The aspects considered for revisions encompass the interpretations of foreign cultures, the basic evangelistic approach of preaching, winning converts and educating them, organising Christian communities and the non-European practice of the religion. The Christian mission in Japan has proved to be a useful tool for these purposes.