This third volume of articles by Paul F. Grendler explores the connections between education, religion, and politics. It combines detailed research, such as on Erasmus's doctorate and the new schools of the Jesuits and Piarists, with broad overviews of European and especially Italian education. Two of the studies appear here for the first time in English.

Few eras took education so seriously or were so innovative in their approaches to schools and universities as the Renaissance. At the same time, religious and political concerns strongly influenced educational developments. This third volume of articles by Paul F. Grendler explores the close connections between education, religion, and politics at several levels and in different contexts. It combines detailed research into various kinds of schools with broad overviews of European and especially Italian education. The lead article compares Italian and German universities and assesses the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the latter. Even Erasmus, the great critic of university theologians, felt the need to acquire a doctorate in theology and did so. In Italy, the new schools of the Jesuits and the Piarists taught boys and young men gratis, but not without opposition. Two articles deal with students, the consumers of education. While teachers and students were most directly involved in schools and universities, ecclesiastical and political authorities, including the leaders of the Republic of Venice, the subject of the final study, kept a watchful eye on them.

An authoritative account of the intellectual and educational history of the late Italian Renaissance. Twenty essays on major themes, institutions, and persons of the Italian Renaissance by one of its most distinguished living historians.

This book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit contributions to the rhetorical tradition established by Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. It analyses the writings of those Jesuits who taught rhetoric at the College of Rome, including Pedro Juan Perpiña, (1530–66), Carlo Reggio (1539–1612), Francesco Benci (1542–94), Famiano Strada (1572–1649) and Tarquinio Galluzzi (1574–1649). Additionally, it discusses the rhetorical views of Jesuits who were not based in Rome, most notably Cypriano Soarez (1524–93), the author of the popular manual De arte rhetorica. Jesuit education, Ciceronianism and civic life feature as the key themes of the book. Early Jesuits and the Rhetorical Tradition, 1540–1650 argues that, in line with Cicero, early modern Jesuit teachers and humanists associated rhetoric with a civic function. Jesuit writings, not only on rhetoric, but also on moral, religious and political themes, testify to their thorough familiarity with Cicero’s civic philosophy. Following Cicero, Isocrates and Renaissance humanists, early modern Jesuit teachers of the studia humanitatis coupled eloquence with wisdom and, in so doing, invested the rhetorician with such qualities and duties which many quattrocento humanists ascribed to an active citizen or statesman. These qualities centred on the duty to promote the common good by actively participating in civic life. This book will appeal to scholars and students alike interested in the history of the Jesuits, history of ideas and early modern history in general.

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.

This collection of original essays, gathered in honor of distinguished historian Ronald G. Witt, explores a range of issues of interest to scholars of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Contributors include Robert Black, Melissa Bullard, Anthony D'Elia, Anthony Grafton, Paul Grendler, James Hankins, John Headley, John Monfasani, and Louise Rice.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was the most versatile humanist of the fifteenth century: author of numerous compositions in both Latin and Italian, and a groundbreaking theorist of painting, sculpture, and architecture. His Latin writings owe much to the model of Petrarch (1304-1374), the famed poet of the Italian Canzoniere, but also a prolific author of Latin epistles, biographies, and poems that sparked the revival of classical culture in the early Italian Renaissance. The essays collected here reflect some thirty years of research into these pioneers of Humanism, and offer important insights into forms of Renaissance 'self-fashioning' such as allegory and autobiography.