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.

'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.

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.