The story about the Tudor school life describes the life and routines of a typical boy from the high social standing in the Tudor era. The main character was born the same year Columbus discovered America. He devotedly loved his mother and missed her when traveling. Yet, he enjoyed the privilege of education, and his memories of school life give a detailed picture of how the school looked half a millennium ago. A reader will learn about the daily routines, meals, education, and typical children's games.

"From meetings and conversation with men, love affairs arise. In the midst of pleasures, banquets, dances, laughter, and self-indulgence, Venus and her son Cupid reign supreme. . . . Poor young girl, if you emerge from these encounters a captive prey! How much better it would have been to remain at home or to have broken a leg of the body rather than of the mind!" So wrote the sixteenth-century Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives in a famous work dedicated to Henry VIII's daughter, Princess Mary, but intended for a wider audience interested in the education of women. Praised by Erasmus and Thomas More, Vives advocated education for all women, regardless of social class and ability. From childhood through adolescence to marriage and widowhood, this manual offers practical advice as well as philosophical meditation and was recognized soon after publication in 1524 as the most authoritative pronouncement on the universal education of women. Arguing that women were intellectually equal if not superior to men, Vives stressed intellectual companionship in marriage over procreation, and moved beyond the private sphere to show how women's progress was essential for the good of society and state.

Humanism has constantly proclaimed the belief that the only way to improve man's life on earth is to make man himself wiser and better. Unfortunately, the voice of the humanists has always been challenged by the loud and cheap promises of scientists, by the inflammatory tirades of politicians, and by the apocalyptic visions of false prophets. Material greed, nonsensical chauvinism, racial prejudice, and religious antagonism have progressively defiled the inner beauty of man. Today's bankruptcy of man's dignity in the midst of an unparalleled material abundance calls for an urgent revival of humanistic ideals and values. This book was planned from its very start as a modest step in that direction. It is not my intention, however, to attempt, once again, a global interpretation of Humanism in general, or of Renaissance Humanism in particular. I have been dissuaded from such a purpose by the failure of contemporary scholars to agree on such basic issues as whether the Renaissance was a total break with or a continuation of medieval culture, whether it was basically a Christian or a pagan movement, whether it was the effect or the cause of the classical revival. Instead, then, of discussing the significance of sixteenth century humanism, this book concentrates upon the life and the thought of a single humanist.

By looking at rhetoric and politics, this book offers a novel account of Juan Luis Vives’ intellectual oeuvre. It argues that Vives adjusted rhetorical theory to a monarchical context in which direct speech was not a possibility, demonstrated how Erasmian languages of ethical self-government and political peace were actualised rhetorically and critically in a princely environment, and finally, rethought the cognitive and emotional foundations of humanist rhetoric in his late and famous De anima et vita (1538). Ultimately, towards the end of his life, Vives epitomised a distinctively cognitive view of politics; he maintained that political concord was not a direct outcome of institutional or legal reform or of the spiritual transformation of the Christian world (an optimistic Erasmian interpretation) but that concord could only be upheld once the dynamics of emotions that motivated political action were understood and controlled through responsible rhetoric that respected decorum and civility.

The humanist treatises presented here are only peripheral to the history of logic, but I think historians of logic may read them with interest, if perhaps with irritation. In the early sixteenth century the humanists set about to demolish medieval logic based on syllogistic and disputation, and to replace it in the university curriculum with a 'rhetorical' logic based on the use of topics and persuasion. To a very large extent they succeeded. Although Aris totelian logic retained a vigorous life in the schools, it never again attained to the overwhelming primacy it had so long enjoyed in the northern universities. It has been the custom to take the arguments of the humanists at face value, and the word 'scholastic' has continued to have pejorative overtones. This is easy to understand, because until recently our knowledge of the high period of medieval logic has been slight, and the humanists' testimony as to its decadent state in the sixteenth century has, for the most part, been accepted uncritically. Within the past two decades important work on medieval logic has recovered the brilliant achievement of thirteenth and fourteenth century logicians, philosophers, and natural scientists. New studies are constantly appearing, and the logico-semantic system of the terminists has become fruitful territory not only for historians of logic but also for students of modern linguistics and semiotics.

The Bible, Gender, and Reception History: The Case of Job's Wife investigates the fleeting appearance in the Bible of Job's wife and its impact on the imaginations of readers throughout history. It begins by presenting key interpretive gaps in the biblical text concerning Job and his wife, explaining the way gender studies offers guiding principles with which the author engages a reception history of their marriage. After analyzing Job and his wife within medieval Christian theology of Eden, the author identifies ways in which Job's wife visually aligns with medieval images of Satan. The volume explores portrayals of Job and his wife in publications on marriage and gender roles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, moving onto an investigation of William Blake's sharp artistic divergence from the common tradition in his representation of Job's wife as a shrew. In the exploration of societal portrayals of Job and his Wife throughout history, this book discovers how arguments about marriage intertwine with not only gender roles, but also, with political, social, and historical movements.

This book recounts the first fifteen years, early education and marriage negotiations of the Habsburg Archduchess, Elizabeth, who grew up in the Royal and Imperial Courts of Vienna and Wiener Neustadt in the latter half of the sixteenth century. It portrays life at the court of Elizabeth's mother, the Empress Maria, and describes tournaments, coronations, plays, medals, chivalric literature, music, art, sewing, and saints' lives, as well as urban contexts. Ideas of political space and travel are discussed against the settings of Prague, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Bratislava, Munich and Augsburg. Elizabeth’s story reveals specific structures of the Habsburg Courts, featuring Spanish, Austrian, Hungarian, Low Country, Italian, and Bohemian courtiers, and sets her personal story against the background of larger international events, such as the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Ottoman Wars.

First available in 1908, this is an account of the school days of Juan Luis Vives (1492 to 1540) who was a Spanish scholar of the Renaissance and was a contemporary of Erasmus and Greek scholar Bude (Budaeus).