These are explored through a reassessment of the role of humanism, with case studies in music (Josquin Desprez), moral philosophy (Valla, Castiglione, Erasmus, More) and political thought (Machiavelli)." "This book is the first in a series of three specifically designed for the Open University course, The Renaissance in Europe: A Cultural Enquiry. The series is designed to appeal both to the general reader and to those studying undergraduate arts courses in the period."--BOOK JACKET.

An up-to-date synthesis of the spread and impact of humanism in Europe. A team of Renaissance scholars of international reputation including Peter Burke, Sydney Anglo, George Holmes and Geoffrey Elton, offers the student, academic and general reader an up-to-date synthesis of our current understanding of the spread and impact of humanism in Europe. Taken together, these essays throw a new and searching light on the Renaissance as a European phenomenon.

The updated second edition of a highly readable synthesis of the major determining features of the Renaissance.

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.

Based on the study of over 500 surviving manuscript school books, this comprehensive 2001 study of the curriculum of school education in medieval and Renaissance Italy contains some surprising conclusions. Robert Black's analysis finds that continuity and conservatism, not innovation, characterize medieval and Renaissance teaching. The study of classical texts in medieval Italian schools reached its height in the twelfth century; this was followed by a collapse in the thirteenth century, an effect on school teaching of the growth of university education. This collapse was only gradually reversed in the two centuries that followed: it was not until the later 1400s that humanists began to have a significant impact on education. Scholars of European history, of Renaissance studies, and of the history of education will find that this deeply researched and broad-ranging book challenges much inherited wisdom about education, humanism and the history of ideas.

Starting with an essay on the Renaissance as the concluding phase of the Middle Ages and ending with appreciations of Paul Oskar Kristeller, the great twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance, this new volume by John Monfasani brings together seventeen articles that focus both on individuals, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, and Niccolò Perotti, and on large-scale movements, such as the spread of Italian humanism, Ciceronianism, Biblical criticism, and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy. In addition to entering into the persistent debate on the nature of the Renaissance, the articles in the volume also engage what of late have become controversial topics, namely, the shape and significance of Renaissance humanism and the character of the Platonic Academy in Florence.

Did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) influence the art of his time? This book starts with an exploration of Ficino’s views on the imagination and discusses whether, how and why these ideas may have been received in Italian Renaissance works of art.