Et Amicorum: Essays on Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy (2025)

"The Place of Renaissance Humanism in the History of Philosophy" 13-15 June 2013 Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

"Humanism" entry in The Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, © Springer International Publishing AG, 2017

This entry examines the humanist articulation of three key philosophical relations: being and seeming, virtue and fortune, and stasis and mutability. These relations address matters of epistemology (knowing), ethics, and ontol-ogy (reality). Humanists, when grappling with these concerns, resorted to alternative approaches. They identified reality on the basis of the stability of reason, which could ground an objective view of things. In this sense, they became finders of wisdom. Or, as seekers of wisdom, they acknowledged the transience of phenomena, which they confronted in their awareness of illusion and limited vision. If they grounded their role as objective expositors of the truth of things on the traditional concept of the animal rationale, they also celebrated the new force of the homo ludens, the philosopher at play, who participates in the unveiling of reality through masking and seeming, and also intersubjec-tively, through conversations with others.

"Renaissance Humanism and Its Discontents," The European Legacy 20.5 (2015): 1-17

The essay explores humanism’s modernity by inquiring into the way the fifteenth-century humanist cultural program posited moral values and, at the same time, contributed to a sense of moral confusion. While Niccolò Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni associated ethical enlightenment with learning and even social acclaim, Leon Battista Alberti criticized these assumptions not only for their susceptibility to political manipulation but also for their failure to cultivate the attributes they promised: virtue, and by extension happiness and tranquillity. The tensions in humanist culture between conformity and dissent, rational certainty and sense of mutability, generated the creative energy that we, as moderns, have come to attribute to this culture.

Review of "M. Landfester (ed.), The Reception of Antiquity in Renaissance Humanism, Brill, Leiden, 2017", Renaissance Quarterly 73/2

Renaissance Quarterly, 2020

Review of The Reception of Antiquity in Renaissance Humanism, edited by Manfred Landfester (Brill’s New Pauly Supplements 8), Leiden: Brill, 2017. xxiv + 548 pp.

Renaissance Philosophy and Book IV of Il Cortegiano

Baldesar Castiglione the Book of the Courtier, 2002

Published in JH, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2003-2004), 2: 485-509. This is a longer form of an essay originally published in Baldesar Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel JAVITCH, Norton Critical Editions, New York 2002, pp. 377-388.

Jacques Cujas (1522-1590), Jurisconsulte humaniste, Genève, Droz (Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, n°DXLI), 2015 [préface d’Anne Rousselet-Pimont et Jean-Louis Thireau ; version imprimée : 592 p. ; version numérique : 864 p.]

Jacques Cujas apparaît comme l’un des principaux représentants de l’humanisme juridique, courant qui introduit l’idée d’évolution dans la construction du droit et des institutions. Au fil de ses professorats, Cujas poursuit la critique humaniste en portant à son apogée la méthode historique. Il cherche à rétablir les textes dans leur version d’origine par la recherche des interpolations, tout en intégrant les dispositions commentées dans la longue durée. Il s’appuie tant sur sa maîtrise de la doctrine juridique, que sur sa vaste culture littéraire et philosophique. Ses travaux de philologue et d’éditeur restent d’utiles références, sans même évoquer ses reconstitutions commentées des ouvrages des juristes romains ou son analyse critique du corpus juris civilis. L’érudition ne tient cependant pas Cujas trop éloigné de la pratique, comme le prouvent ses consultations ou son étude de la féodalité. Soumis à l’épreuve de l’humanisme cujacien, le droit ressort transformé de la confrontati...

Renaissance Humanism and Historiography Today

Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, 2005

Topics in the Renaissance (entry), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, Springer, 2019

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 M. Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, https://doi.

Humanism between Middle Ages and Renaissance

New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship, 2021

Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy presents a glittering fresco of grandiloquent personalities and cultural dynamism, the colors of which gleam brighter because of their contrast to his briefly sketched medieval dystopia. Burckhardt, of course, did not introduce this dichotomy; it was Petrarch who “created” the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have recognized the artificiality of Petrarchan-Burckhardtian periodization, and medievalists, in particular, have railed against it. Yet in spite of copious evidence for continuities between medieval and Renaissance intellectual life, students, and many scholars, still contrast an ahistorical, otherworldly, clerical intellectual culture of the period before 1300 with a secular, classicizing, and anthropocentric Renaissance agenda. Although specialists would eschew this stark dichotomy, those trained as medievalists continue to focus on scholasticism when they discuss 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th century intellectual life, while those trained as early modernists highlight everything that was (or was claimed to be) novel about the humanists’ program. This chapter argues that a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the emergence of humanism requires, first, that scholars examine the records of schools, courts, and chanceries with the care of researchers like Robert Black and Ronald Witt. Second, it demands that medievalists and early modernists adopt, or at least borrow, each other’s research tools and questions. What are the post-Augustinian, as well as the classical, sources for a humanistic text? How do figures like Marsilio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pietro Pompanazzi evince or disdain a new historical approach? Substantive intellectual changes can only be identified by modern scholars who are equipped to distinguish between the inflammatory rhetoric of eager self-promoters and novel ways of thinking. Recognizing the true importance of humanism within early modern European culture requires better understanding of its continuing interaction with earlier scholarly practices.

Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance

Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance, 2006

He has published The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy (2004). He is currently translating Platina's History of the Popes and studying humanist antipapal conspiracies in Renaissance Rome. Charles Fantazzi is Thomas Harriot Distinguished Professor of Humanities, East Carolina University. He is the editor and translator of Poliziano, Silvae, I Tatti Renaissance Library (2004); Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, (2000); the Collected Works of Erasmus, vols. 13 and 14 of the Correspondence (in press); editor of Selected Works of Juan Luis Vives (Brill); and editor of and contributor to a Companion to Vives, also with Brill.