Matthias Roick - Böcker

History of Universities XXXIV/2 contains the customary mix of learned articles which makes this publication an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. This volume offers a history of the teaching of ethics in early modern Europe.

First secretary to the Aragonese kings of Naples, Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503) was a key figure of the Italian Renaissance. A poet and a philosopher of high repute, Pontano’s works offer a reflection on the achievements of fifteenth-century humanism and address major themes of early modern moral and political thought.Taking his defining inspiration from Aristotle, Pontano wrote on topics such as prudence, fortune, magnificence, and the art of pleasant conversation, rewriting Aristotle’s Ethics in the guise of a new Latin philosophy, inscribed with the patterns of Renaissance culture. This book shows how Pontano’s rewriting of Aristotelian ethics affected not only his philosophical views, but also his political life and his place in the humanist movement. Drawing on Pontano’s treatises, dialogues, letters, poems and political writings, Matthias Roick presents us with the first comprehensive study of Pontano’s moral and political thought, offering novel insights into the workings of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the early modern period.

First secretary to the Aragonese kings of Naples, Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503) was a key figure of the Italian Renaissance. A poet and a philosopher of high repute, Pontano’s works offer a reflection on the achievements of fifteenth-century humanism and address major themes of early modern moral and political thought.Taking his defining inspiration from Aristotle, Pontano wrote on topics such as prudence, fortune, magnificence, and the art of pleasant conversation, rewriting Aristotle’s Ethics in the guise of a new Latin philosophy, inscribed with the patterns of Renaissance culture. This book shows how Pontano’s rewriting of Aristotelian ethics affected not only his philosophical views, but also his political life and his place in the humanist movement. Drawing on Pontano’s treatises, dialogues, letters, poems and political writings, Matthias Roick presents us with the first comprehensive study of Pontano’s moral and political thought, offering novel insights into the workings of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the early modern period.

This book investigates the meanings of the notion of friendship in the Renaissance from two perspectives, philological and philosophical, by observing how the notion was used in a broad spectrum of case studies of Renaissance culture. Each chapter highlights the ways in which authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (writers, philosophers, philologists, politicians, etc.) appropriated Greek and Latin paradigms of friendship, on the one hand, applying them to understand their own social and political context while, on the other hand, they created new paradigms of friendship in both the public and private spheres. Each chapter develops an argument on the notion of friendship starting from the investigation of a particular context and creating a network of connections between words related to friendship, such as speaking sincerely (parrhēsia), flattery, justice, love, pleasure, good, utility, virtue, good life, and truth, in both the private and public domains. The writers addressed in the various chapters are – with regard to the ancients – Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plutarch, Cicero and Seneca and – among the moderns – Machiavelli, Montaigne, Thomas More, Erasmus, Juan de Mariana, Feliciano Silvestri, Johannes Caselius, the members of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, and the authors of Renaissance emblem books.