This volume comprises original contributions from 17 scholars whose work and careers Ronald Witt has touched in myriad ways. Intellectual, social, and political historians, a historian of philosophy and an art historian: specialists in various temporal and geographical regions of the Renaissance world here address specific topics reflecting some of the major themes that have woven their way through Ronald Witt’s intellectual cursus. While some essays offer fresh readings of canonical texts and explore previously unnoticed lines of filiation among them, others present “discoveries,” including a hitherto “lost” text and overlooked manuscripts that are here edited for the first time. Engagement with little-known material reflects another of Witt's distinguishing characteristics: a passion for original sources. The essays are gathered under three rubrics: (1) “Politics and the Revival of Antiquity”; (2) “Humanism, Religion, and Moral Philosophy”; and (3) “Erudition and Innovation.” Contributors include: Robert Black, Melissa Meriam Bullard, Christopher S. Celenza, Anthony F. D’Elia, Charles Fantazzi, Kenneth Gouwens, Anthony Grafton, Paul F. Grendler, James Hankins, John M. Headley, Mark Jurdjevic, Timothy Kircher, David A. Lines, Edward P. Mahoney, John Monfasani, Louise Rice, and T.C. Price Zimmerman. Publications by Ronald G. Witt: 'In the Footsteps of the Ancients': The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, ISBN: 978 90 04 11397 8 (Paperback: 978 0 391 04202 5)

By using the fresh investigative language of cognitive history, a symbiosis of the methods of cognitive science and historical inquiry, this book departs from almost all previous approaches to Renaissance studies. The Renaissance has attracted the attention of distinguished scholars from many different vantage points – political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural. In this volume, Subrata Dasgupta sheds an alternative light on the Renaissance by considering it as a creative phenomenon. To be creative is to make history by producing material and/or abstract artifacts that are both new and consequential; to be creative also entails drawing on history and on the culture of the time. Most significantly, the creative process occurs in individual minds: it is a cognitive process of a very special kind. Beginning with a ‘prehistory’ set in classical Greece and medieval Islam, this book explores a variety of inventions and discoveries through the 14th–16th centuries, mainly in Italy, in humanities, painting, architecture, craft technology, anatomy, natural science, and engineering. This book will be of interest not only to Renaissance scholars but also to students interested in Renaissance history and the nature of the creative tradition.

The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years.

Authored by some of the most preeminent Renaissance scholars active today, the essays of this volume give fresh and illuminating analyses of important aspects of Renaissance humanism, such as the time and causes of its origin, its connection to the papal court and medieval traditions, its classical learning, its religious and literary dimensions, and its dramatis personae. Their interpretations are varied to the point of being contradictory. The essays bear the imprint of the work of the eminent scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, especially Kristeller’s, and demonstrate an awareness of the various modes of critical inquiry that have prevailed in recent years. As such they are an important exemplar of current scholarship on Renaissance humanism and are, therefore, indispensable to the scholar who wishes to explore this pivotal cultural movement. Contributors include: Robert Black, Alison Brown, Riccardo Fubini, Paul F. Grendler, James Hankins, Eckhard Kessler, Arthur F. Kinney, Angelo Mazzocco, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Massimo Miglio, John Monfasani, Charles G. Nauert, and Ronald G. Witt.

This important study takes a new approach to understanding Italian Renaissance humanism, one of the most important cultural movements in Western history. Through a series of close textual studies, Patrick Baker explores the meaning that Italian Renaissance humanism had for an essential but neglected group: the humanists themselves.

The first comprehensive, synoptic study of humanistic ideas of Empire in the period c.1250-1402, Humanism and Empire offers a radical new interpretation of fourteenth-century political thought, and raises wide-ranging questions about the foundations of modern constitutional ideas and the origins of the concept of liberty.

This new textbook provides students with a highly readable synthesis of the major determining features of the European Renaissance, one of the most influential cultural revolutions in history. Professor Nauert's approach is broader than the traditional focus on Italy, and tackles the themes in the wider European context. He traces the origins of the humanist 'movement' and connects it to the social and political environments in which it developed. In a tour-de-force of lucid exposition over six wide-ranging chapters, Nauert charts the key intellectual, social, educational and philosophical concerns of this humanist revolution, using art and biographical sketches of key figures to illuminate the discussion. The study also traces subsequent transformations of humanism and its solvent effect on intellectual developments in the late Renaissance.

Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of “critical posthumanisms” in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today’s “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if “the human” is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny “contemporary”—and ally—of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.