The Discourse of Demetrius Chalcondyles on the Inauguration of Greek Studies at the University of Padua in 1463

Few historians today would challenge the dictum that it was the development of Greek studies in the West that did more than any other single factor to enlarge and widen the intellectual horizon of the Italian Renaissance. The broad lines of this pattern of development are now reasonably well known, and scholars are devoting efforts rather to elucidating details in the transmission of Greek learning from Byzantium to Italy. Nevertheless, occasionally a document may be discovered that will not only provide new details but clarify an entire episode of capital importance in the development of Western Greek studies.

Natural Law as the Foundation for an Autonomous Ethic: Pierre Charron's De la Sagesse

Living during the French religious wars, Pierre Charron (1541-1603) was acutely aware of the dangers inherent in basing morality on religion. The battles between the Huguenot minority and the Catholic majority raged in the pulpits as well as on the streets. Calvinist ministers flocking into France from Geneva gave leadership to Huguenot demands for religious liberty. While before 1562 most ministers tried to quell rather than incite riots, after war broke out many utilized their influence and their pulpits to aid the Protestant side. On the other side, the French Catholic clergy, aided by royal persecution edicts, was generally in favor of a policy of wiping out Huguenot heresy. Massacre, persecution, martyrdom, political resistance, and assassination became topics and events of the day.

Sculptors' Partnerships in Michelozzo's Florence

The study of the socio-economic aspects of artists' workshops and partnerships in early renaissance Florence has not stimulated much interest, perhaps because there remains the temptation to savor the romantic idea that the individual genius creates his masterpiece in solitude and sweat. But art production in the Renaissance was much like any other business, and its history in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries is inextricably tied to the workshop method. Few works of art were produced by the endeavors of one man alone, and in each city there were groups of artists working together in competing botteghe. The shop operated as a small clan with its own supporters, clients, and publicity, and often included carpenters, gilders, carvers of moldings, etc.—what we would call minor craftsmen.

Rabelais and Stoic Portrayal

The influence of Stoicism in the works of Rabelais has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars. The importance of Stoicism in Rabelaisian thought has been interpreted by some to have permitted Rabelais to draft a physical theory of the cosmos based on Stoic monism and its doctrine of universal permeation. For others, Stoicism provided the French humanist with the concept of Pantagruelism, Rabelais’ ‘mépris des choses fortuites’, which they see as forming a restatement of the Stoic principle of apathy or indifference toward things external. Finally, one critic holds that Rabelais’ leaning toward Stoicism represents only partial commitment during a period of intense syncretism wherein the writer assimilates and subordinates Stoic ideas to yet another body of thought which is Evangelical by definition: Stoic indifference - Pauline Folly, the Pan- Christ symbol, the duty of man to conform his will to the Will of God, and so forth.

Giovanni Conversini's Consolatio ad Donatum on the Death of Petrarch

Late in the summer of 1374 news of the death of Francesco Petrarca swept through Italy and soon crossed the Alps into the rest of Christendom: during the night of the 18th of July the humanist had died surrounded by his books in his study at Arquà, a village in the Euganean Hills to the south of Padua. Six days later he was buried in pomp in the parish church of that village; it was a funeral attended by a throng that included the signore of Padua, Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara, and the bishops of Padua, of Vicenza, of Verona, and of Treviso. The funeral oration was pronounced by one of the poet's closest Paduan friends, the Augustinian friar Bonaventura Badoer; in a stately ceremony the coffin, borne by sixteen doctors of law, was deposited in the Chiesa Arcipretale.

English Writers and Beza's Latin Epigrams: The Uses and Abuses of Poetry

To many Englishmen of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Théodore de Bèze (or Beza, as he was usually called) was a famous and respected figure, widely known as the biographer and successor of Calvin and as the author of a number of theological treatises and Biblical commentaries which spelled out major aspects of Calvinist thought. English readers also knew him well as a translator of Scripture, whose Latin had angered both Lutheran and Catholic scholars, as a translator of the Psalms into French and Latin poetry, and perhaps, even, as the author of an early experiment in vernacular Biblical tragedy, Abraham sacrifiant.

Patrician Women in Early Renaissance Venice

Almost a century ago, the Venetian archivist and historian Bartolomeo Cecchetti undertook to discover what he called ‘the general concept that Venetians had of women’. Though he called his study ‘Woman in the Middle Ages in Venice’, nearly all his documentation came from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the early Renaissance. His conclusions after a long and wideranging survey of various aspects of the feminine experience during the period were pretty forthright. ‘Neither works of imagination’, he declared, ‘nor high intellectual attainments, nor flights of poetry adorn the figure of woman in Venice's earliest epoch. Modest, domestic [casalinga], she is swept up in the great whirlwind of life; and she appears to us only in her weaknesses, or in the splendor of her beauty, or in the context of one of the high offices of her mission—her children, her family.’

Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors A-B

Aristotelianism occupies a unique position in the intellectual history of the Latin West. From Boethius to Galileo—from the end of classical civilization to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and in some circles even beyond—die works of the philosopher had a decisive influence, not only on the development of theology, philosophy, and natural sciences, but also on university structure and the system of education. The history of Aristotle's influence in the Middle Ages, especially the history of its thirteenth- century beginnings, is quite well known. But renaissance scholars have generally concentrated on the revolt against the Scholastic Aristode, the revival of other ancient philosophies, and the birth of the new science, only recently turning their attention to the history of Aristotelianism and university philosophy.