These essays are concerned with the nature of early renaissance political thought and the relationship between humanism and medieval rhetoric. One group traces the influence of medieval political thought on the rise of the modern conception of republicanism; others focus on the medieval art of letter writing and its place in the medieval cultural context; while still others analyse the often contradictory thought of the early humanist, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), who struggled to reconcile his classical learning with his medieval allegiances. In the collection as a whole humanism emerges as a literary movement drawing as heavily on patristic and medieval culture as on antiquity. Awareness of its various debts permits recognition of what humanism itself contributed to the development of western thought and ethics.

This handbook of Anabaptism and Spiritualism provides an informative survey of recent scholarship on the Radical Reformation, from the 1520s to the end of the eighteenth century. Each chapter offers a narrative summary that engages current research and suggests directions for future study.

The Companion to Central and Eastern European Humanism: The Czech Lands is the first reference work on humanists and their literary activities in this region to appear in English. It provides biographical and bibliographical data about humanist literary life between c. 1480 and 1630, in two volumes, organised alphabetically by authors’ names. This first volume includes three introductory chapters together with more than 130 biographical entries covering the letters A-L and a complete overview of the most recent research on humanism in Central Europe. The interdisciplinary research team behind this Companion paid particular attention to local approaches to the classical tradition, to humanistic multilingualism and to Bohemian authors’ participation in European scholarly networks. The Companion is a highly relevant resource for all academics who are interested in humanism and the history of early modern literature in Central Europe.

Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance is widely considered one of the most important works in Italian Renaissance studies. Princeton University Press published this seminal book in 1955. Now the Press makes available a two-volume collection of eighteen of Professor Baron's essays, most of them thoroughly revised, unpublished, or presented in English for the first time. Spanning the larger part of his career, they provide a continuation of, and complement to, the earlier book. The essays demonstrate that, contemporaneously with the revolution in art, modern humanistic thought developed in the city-state climate of early Renaissance Florence to a far greater extent than has generally been assumed. The publication of these volumes is a major scholarly event: a reinforcement and amplification of the author's conception of civic Humanism. The book includes studies of medieval antecedents and special studies of Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Leon Battista Alberti. It offers a thoroughly re-conceived profile of Machiavelli, drawn against the background of civic Humanism, as well as essays presenting evidence that French and English Humanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely tied to Italian civic thought of the fifteenth. The work culminates in a reassessment of Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering thought on the Renaissance. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Focusing on the ways his art and persona were valued and criticized by writers, collectors, and artists subsequent to his death, this book examines the reception of the works of Albrecht D?rer. Andrea Bubenik's analysis highlights the intensive and international interest in D?rer's art and personality, and his developing role as a paragon in art historiography, in conjunction with the proliferation of portraits after his likeness. The author traces carefully how D?rer's paintings, prints, drawings and theoretical writings traveled widely, and were appropriated into new contexts and charged with different meanings. Drawing on inventories and correspondences and taking collecting practices into account, Bubenik establishes who owned what by D?rer in the 16th and 17th centuries, and characterizes the key locations where interest in D?rer peaked (especially the courts of Maximilian I in Munich, and Rudolf II in Prague). Bubenik treats the emergent artistic appropriations of D?rer-borrowings from or transformations of his originals-in conjunction with contemporary sources on art theory. The volume includes illustrations of numerous imitative works after D?rer. As well as being the first book to fully address the early reception of the most important of German Renaissance artists, Reframing Albrecht D?rer shows how appropriation is a crucial concept for understanding artistic practice during the early modern period.