This book is a novel attempt to understand humanism as a socially meaningful cultural idiom in late Renaissance East Central Europe. Through an exploration of geographical regions that are relatively little known to an English reading public, it argues that late sixteenth-century East Central Europe was culturally thriving and intellectually open in the period between Copernicus and Galileo. Humanism was a dominant cluster of shared intellectual practices and cultural values that brought a number of concrete benefits both to the social-climber intellectual and to the social elite. Two exemplary case studies illustrate this thesis in substantive detail, and highlight the ambivalences and difficulties court humanists routinely faced. The protagonists Johannes Sambucus and Andreas Dudith, both born in the Kingdom of Hungary, were two of the major humanists of the Habsburg court, central figures in cosmopolitan networks of men of learning and characteristic representatives of an Erasmian spirit that was struggling for survival in the face of confessionalisation. Through an analysis of their careers at court and a presentation of their self-fashioning as savants and courtiers, the book explores the social and political significance of their humanist learning and intellectual strategies.

Religious toleration is much discussed these days. But where did the Western notion of toleration come from? In this thought-provoking book Gary Remer traces arguments for religious toleration back to the Renaissance, demonstrating how humanist thinkers initiated an intellectual tradition that has persisted even to our present day. Although toleration has long been recognized as an important theme in Renaissance humanist thinking, many scholars have mistakenly portrayed the humanists as proto-Englightenment rationalists and nascent liberals. Remer, however, offers the surprising conclusion that humanist thinking on toleration was actually founded on the classical tradition of rhetoric. It was the rhetorician's commitment to decorum, the ability to argue both sides of an issue, and the search for an acceptable epistemological standard in probability and consensus that grounded humanist arguments for toleration. Remer also finds that the primary humanist model for a full-fledged theory of toleration was the Ciceronian rhetorical category of sermo (conversation). The historical scope of this book is wide-ranging. Remer begins by focusing on the works of four humanists: Desiderius Erasmus, Jacobus Acontius, William Chillingworth, and Jean Bodin. Then he considers the challenge posed to the humanist defense of toleration by Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Bayle. Finally, he shows how humanist ideas have continued to influence arguments for toleration even after the passing of humanism&—from John Locke to contemporary American discussions of freedom of speech.

This book attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism, asking how we can use stories to complicate our understanding of others, and questioning the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. With case studies of films like Parenthood (1989), American Beauty (1999), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and The Kids Are All Right (2010), this original study synthesises leading discourses on media and cognition, evolutionary anthropology, literature and film analysis into a new theory of the storytelling instinct.

This volume is the first attempt to assess the impact of both humanism and Protestantism on the education offered to a wide range of adolescents in the hundreds of grammar schools operating in England between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. By placing that education in the context of Lutheran, Calvinist and Jesuit education abroad, it offers an overview of the uses to which Latin and Greek were put in English schools, and identifies the strategies devised by clergy and laity in England for coping with the tensions between classical studies and Protestant doctrine. It also offers a reassessment of the role of the 'godly' in English education, and demonstrates the many ways in which a classical education came to be combined with close support for the English Crown and established church. One of the major sources used is the school textbooks which were incorporated into the 'English Stock' set up by leading members of the Stationers' Company of London and reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the core of classical education remained essentially the same for two centuries, there was a growing gulf between the methods by which classics were taught in elite institutions such as Winchester and Westminster and in the many town and country grammar schools in which translations or bilingual versions of many classical texts were given to weaker students. The success of these new translations probably encouraged editors and publishers to offer those adults who had received little or no classical education new versions of works by Aesop, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca and Caesar. This fascination with ancient Greece and Rome left its mark not only on the lifestyle and literary tastes of the educated elite, but also reinforced the strongly moralistic outlook of many of the English laity who equated virtue and good works with pleasing God and meriting salvation.

The author contends that the traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the 16th-century. Margo Todd reveals the puritans to be the heirs to a complex intellectual legacy.

Understanding Humanism is an easy-to-read and informative overview of the beliefs, practices, and values of humanism as a non-religious worldview. This short and lively book explores humanism both as a broad historical tradition of thought and as a stance embodied in organised institutions. It sets out clearly and systematically the beliefs and values of humanism as well as the reality and personal experience of living as a humanist today. Questions discussed in this book include: How do humanists see the relation between science and religious belief? Is humanism wedded to science as the only valid form of knowledge? What value do humanists place on the arts, and can they value religious art? Does the emphasis on human responsibility depend on an untenable belief in 'free will', and is this undermined by psychology and neuroscience? Do humanists think that life is sacred? What account would humanists give of the basis of human rights, and why they are important? Does humanism entail that human life is meaningless and pointless? Can humanists meet the challenge of nihilism? Understanding Humanism provides a reliable and easily digestible introduction to the field. By exploring these questions and inviting readers to engage with the arguments, it serves as the ideal textbook for those approaching the topic of humanism for the first time.

This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing-their eloquence—but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much rupture with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new confidence about an old idea: the moral instructiveness of pagan, classical texts for Christian readers. This revaluation of literature was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, humanist confidence inspired authors to invent their own good books—good in style and morals—in morality plays such as Everyman and the Christian Terence tradition and in educational treatises such as Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke of the Governour. On the other hand, humanism placed a new burden on authors, requiring their work to teach and delight. In the wake of humanism, authors struggled to articulate the value of their work for readers, returning to a pre-humanist path that they associated with Geoffrey Chaucer. This medieval-inflected doubt pervades the late sixteenth-century writings of the most prolific and influential Elizabethans-Robert Greene, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.

“I believe in a new humanity.” Evocative words spoken by Pope Francis to the assembled young people in Kraków, Poland during the final mass for World Youth Day on July 31, 2016. What was he thinking about? Where did this idea come from? This book answers these questions and examines for the first time an original way of thinking about our shared humanity, a way that was intimated sixty years ago and is still to be explored.

The term 'humanist' originally referred to a scholar of Classical literature. In the Renaissance and particularly in the Elizabethan age, European intellectuals devoted themselves to the rediscovery and study of Roman and Greek literature and culture. This trend of Renaissance thought became known in the 19th century as 'humanism'. Often a difficult concept to understand, the term Elizabethan Humanism is introduced in Part One and explained in a number of different contexts. Part Two illustrates how knowledge of humanism allows a clearer understanding of Elizabethan literature, by looking closely at major texts of the Elizabethan period which include Spenser's, 'The Shepherd's Calendar'; Marlowe's 'Faustus' and Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'.

This is the third and final volume of a set of studies on the development of humanism in the northern Netherlands and the adjoining parts of Germany between 1469, when, in the oldest letters preserved of Rudolph Agricola and Rudolph von Langen, first mention is made of a group of early humanist scholars at the Adwert monastery near Groningen, and 1625, when the humanist Ubbo Emmius died, who was the first rector of the university of Groningen. The earlier two volumes are Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444-1485) (1988) and Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489) and Northern Humanism (1993). This last volume has papers on Regnerus Praedinius (1510-1559), Alexander Hegius (ca.1433-1498), Alexander Candidus ( 1555), Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489), the Bremen Gymnasium Illustre between 1560-1630, humanist commentaries on Boethius, scholasticism and humanism, humanism and philosophy, Agricola Latinus, Ubbo Emmius's 'art of description', Agricola's dialectics at Louvain, Agricola on deliberative speech, humanism and reformation, Erasmus and geography, Agricola in Pavia, Dutch students at Italian universities (1425-1575), relations between Heidelberg and the Low Countries in the late 16th century, the Modern Devotion and humanism.Many of the papers were originally presented at a conference in 1996, but they have been extensively rewritten and edited, and a number of new pieces have been included. An updated bibliography in this volume makes the three volumes together an indispensable tool for scholars of philology, literature, history, philosophy and theology of the period.Contributors include: F. Akkerman, J.C. Bedaux, C.P.M. Burger, C.M.A. Caspers, T. Elsmann, M. Goris, M.J.F.M. Hoenen, P. Kooiman, H.A. Krop, Z.R.W.M. von Martels, L.W. Nauta, J. Papy, M. van der Poel, E. Rummel, R.J. Schoeck, A. Sottili, A. Tervoort, A.E. Walter, and A.G. Weiler.