RSART: Renaissance Society of America Reprint Text Series – serie

'The humanist idea of education is among the permanently influential legacies of the Italian Renaissance. Four short Latin treatises published between 1400 and 1460 define it admirably: Pier Paolo Vergerio's De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adolescentiae studiis; Leonardo Bruni's De studiis et literis; the De liberorum educatione of Aeneas Sylvius, who later became Pope Pius II; and Battista Guarino's De ordine docendi et studendi. Translated into English by William Harrison Woodward and framed, on the one hand, by his description of the famous school founded by Vittorino da Feltre in 1424 at the court of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, and, on the other, by a judiciously balanced analysis of the aims and methods of the humanist educators, these important texts form the heart of a book that has remained for almost seventy years the fundamental study of early Renaissance educational theory and practice.' From the foreword by Eugene F. Rice Jr.

Giordano Bruno was an itinerant Italian friar who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresies, that included his rejection of the Ptolemaic cosmology. Like Galileo, who met a similar fate for similar reasons later in the century, Bruno has been accorded martyrdom to the cause of scientific truth and regarded as a visionary whose ideas were out of joint with the superstitions of his time. In fact, as editors Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner point out, Bruno was far more complex, and his thought far more intricate, than simple stereotype would suggest.Possibly mad, certainly brilliant, vain, obstreperous, and often ignorant, Bruno was a Christian deeply immersed in Hermeticism and mysticism; simultaneously he was Copernican in his non-homocentric view of the universe. His La Cena de le ceneri was one of the first works in which Copernican theory was received outside the sphere of the natural sciences. These dialogues have never been generally accessible, and are translated into English as The Ash Wednesday Supper.Using Copernican theory as both a foundation of and a metaphor for his own vast philosophical-theological-political-social program, Bruno united his conflicting beliefs and frustrated his critics. Arguing for the physical reality of the infinite universe with no centre, yet whose centre is everywhere, Bruno sought to prove that each man is every other man. Using this radical cosmology and the imagery of Lenten regeneration, the messianic Bruno sought to heal the secular and religious wounds of sixteenth-century Europe by reconciling Catholic and Protestant, France and England.In this edition Gosselin and Lerner have provided a broad understanding of Bruno and his time, with background and interpretive discussion. They have also preserved the flavour and ferment of the original discourses and maintained Bruno's eclectic if somewhat obscure style.

An anthology of writings from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries designed to illustrate the life and thought of Italians for students and the general reader. It offers a broad sampling of humanist work by educators, statesmen, philosophers, churchmen and courtiers translated into English. This is a reprint of a book first published in 1965.

When attempting to globally divide ideas into orthodox and subversive categories, it is not always clear what precisely is subversive to the dominant ideology and vice versa. Going against recent trends in English Renaissance studies, Deborah Shuger examines orthodox, rather than subversive, methods of thought in the English Renaissance. Instead of finding a monolithic, unified body of thought, she reveals a remarkably non-uniform 'orthodox' ideology containing a wide range of views. Shuger's approach also re-examines and re-legitimizes the investigation of the connections between religion and literature. First published in 1990, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance presaged an expanding and progressively more popular mode of inquiry in English Renaissance scholarship.

First published in 1971 by Harper & Row, The Society of Renaissance Florence is an invaluable collection of 132 original Florentine documents dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and covering a wide range of subjects from taxes to social mobility, to family, death, and civic life, to violence, crime, and morality. Also included are seldom seen documents addressing the state of the poor and such groups as Jews, heretics, sorcerers, and homosexuals.'I have made a conscious effort to select material which reveals something about the emotions, passions, and temperaments of Renaissance Florentines. 'These documents are examples of the raw material with which the historian works, as he attempts to describe social structures, patterns of behavior, and value systems. They should convey some sense of the complexity of this society, and of the formidable task which confronts the student who seeks to generalize about its character... They can serve as models for the student interested in the problems of urban history in pre-industrial Europe.' - From the Preface.

'I wish we were able to eliminate poverty completely in this city' Those words written by Juan Luis Vives, a Spanish humanist living in Bruges in 1526, could have been written in the late twentieth century. The urban problems of sixteenth-century Bruges are very familiar to the modern reader: poverty, overcrowding, crime, the problems of the mentally ill, and the issue of the responsibility of government for the care of the poor. Published in 1526, On Assistance to the Poor was Vives' effort to bring these questions to the attention of the City Council of Bruges, and have them addressed by local government. His distinctive development of a single integrated system out of the several practices already in use in Northern Europe presaged the English Poor Laws of 1601 and later laws in the New World.The present edition, originally published in 1971 with an introduction, translation, and commentary by Sister Alice Tobriner, is a valuable primary source in Renaissance social history.

Ludovico Dolce's Dialogo della pittura first appeared in Venice in 1557. L'Aretino, by which the work is known today, consists of a three-part dialogue between two Venetians, Aretino and Fabrini, on the particular merits of works of art and artists, including Michaelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello. It is based largely on Aretino's letters.The edition is presented in the original Italian with English facing-page translation. This study of early art criticism serves to reveal something of how aesthetics were judged based on classical sources (especially Aristotle) and contemporary writers like Vasari.

During the Renaissance, there were two centres of art, culture and mercantile power in Italy: Florence, and Venice. This is a sourcebook of primary materials, almost none previously available in English, for the history of the city-state of Venice. The time period covers the apogee of Venetian power and reputation to the beginnings of its decline in the 1630s. Sources used include diaries, chronicles, Inquisitorial records, literature, legislation, and contemporary descriptions, and are organized in sections by theme and accompanied by brief introductions.Originally published by Basil Blackwell, 1992.

In an age when the printed book was still in its infancy, the pulpit was the mass medium. A vital part of religious life, sermons were the chief occasions on which the church attempted to bridge the gap between high theology and popular religious culture. The preaching event provided the opportunity for men and women to socialize, flirt, dispute with or mock the preacher and, in a more positive way, to heed the preacher's words and change their lives. Larissa Taylor has examined over 1600 sermons given by the leading lay preachers in France between 1460 and 1560, and examines the social context of preaching and the sermon while reconstructing popular attitudes towards original sin, free will, purgatory, the Devil, the sacraments, and the magical arts. Previously published by Oxford University Press, 1992. Winner of the 1996 John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America.

Lauro Martines' exhaustive search of manuscript material in the state archives of Florence is the basis for a fascinating portrayal of representative humanists of the period. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists explores the wealth, family tradition, civic prominence, and intellectual achievements of these individuals while assessing the attitudes of other Florentines towards them. Martines demonstrates that humanists tended to be wealthy educated men from important families, challenging long-held assumptions about the status of humanisits in that society.First published in 1963, this groundbreaking study provides a detailed picture of the social structure of Florence in the Quattrocento. Martines's work influenced a generation of scholars and illuminated a complex and multifaceted world.

First published in German in 1938 and later translated into English, this classic of Italian Renaissance historiography centres on the relationship between Florentine art and the conditions under which it was created. In rich detail, Martin Wackernagel explores the impact of patronage and function, widespread demand for art, workshop techniques, and businesses practices on artists' lives and the results they achievedWackernagel stresses the changing roles of commissions and patrons in the late fourteenth to the early fifteenth centuries, from small-scale enterprise under Lorenzo de Medici to the large-scale development of major Florentine monuments. Through this, he highlights the development of major civic and religious artistic complexes such as the Palazzo Vecchio, the Cathedral and Baptistery, and the convent of Santa Maria Novella. This volume also features a biography of the author and an essay on important later publications related to Wackernagel's themes and arguments.

"Utopia" has a strong claim to be the most misunderstood book ever written; its name has been hijacked by countless idealistic schemes having little in common with More's own assessment of social possibilities. For although it contributes to a line of argument that can be traced from Plato to Marx, "Utopia" is first and foremost a literary work that appeals to the imagination and seeks to question us rather than to proffer answers.This study prepares the reader for these challenges, placing the work in the context of early sixteenth-century Europe and the intellectual preoccupations of More's own humanist circle, and clarifying those sources in classical and Christian political thought that provoked his writing."Utopia" is presented as a penetrating reflection on political idealism, one that has lost none of its relevance in an age that has witnessed the collapse of Marxists aspirations to social control. Dominic Baker-Smith also surveys the varied critical reception accorded to "Utopia" over the last four centuries, providing an intriguing look at "Utopia's" role in cultural history.

Lauro Martines' exhaustive search of manuscript material in the state archives of Florence is the basis for a fascinating portrayal of representative humanists of the period. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists explores the wealth, family tradition, civic prominence, and intellectual achievements of these individuals while assessing the attitudes of other Florentines towards them. Martines demonstrates that humanists tended to be wealthy educated men from important families, challenging long-held assumptions about the status of humanisits in that society.First published in 1963, this groundbreaking study provides a detailed picture of the social structure of Florence in the Quattrocento. Martines's work influenced a generation of scholars and illuminated a complex and multifaceted world.

Lauro Martines' exhaustive search of manuscript material in the state archives of Florence is the basis for a fascinating portrayal of representative humanists of the period. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists explores the wealth, family tradition, civic prominence, and intellectual achievements of these individuals while assessing the attitudes of other Florentines towards them. Martines demonstrates that humanists tended to be wealthy educated men from important families, challenging long-held assumptions about the status of humanisits in that society.First published in 1963, this groundbreaking study provides a detailed picture of the social structure of Florence in the Quattrocento. Martines's work influenced a generation of scholars and illuminated a complex and multifaceted world.