Bringing together materials on the thesis of the late Edward Cranz, this book aims to present a fundamental reorientation of the categories of thought in the Latin West. It also includes a research on the reception of Classical and early Christian political thought, demonstrating the pertinence of this to the reorientation thesis.

The previous Variorum collection of studies by the late F. Edward Cranz focused specifically on Nicholas of Cusa. The present selection has an equally clear focus, but a far broader scope: it brings together materials on his major thesis, of a fundamental reorientation of the categories of thought in the Latin West, c. 1100 AD, a thesis that dominated his work from the 1960s onwards. The volume differs from the usual Variorum collection in that much of the material is hitherto unpublished, distributed only in 'samizdat' form to Cranz's friends and colleagues. Nancy Struever has collated and edited the versions of these papers, and supplied the necessary annotation for his references. It includes, too, some of the research related to his editions of the Late Antique Aristotelian commentator, Alexander Aphrodisiensis, and his early research on the reception of Classical and early Christian political thought, demonstrating the pertinence of this to the reorientation thesis. Cranz's argument, centering on Anselm's reading of Augustine, and Abelard's of Boethius, but dealing with Renaissance and Reformation figures such as Petrarch and Valla, Cusanus and Luther, Nifo and Zabarella, claims a reorientation in speculative genres of the most basic premises of the relations of mind, language, and reality. Cranz's meticulous close readings of the texts make the case that the reorientation was so deep and thorough as to problematise our modern readings of Hellenic thinkers such as Aristotle, and so radical as to be 'almost invisible' to the Medieval and post-Medieval thinkers. The definitions and distinctions of thematics in this collection are of intrinsic interest, then, to Classical and Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern intellectual historians. Indeed, Cranz's work vindicates serious intellectual historical inquiry as indispensable to our understanding of the basic motives and accomplishments of the culture of Pre-Modernity.

This Palgrave Pivot examines how prominent thinkers throughout history, from ancient Greece to sixteenth-century France, have perceived tyrants and tyranny. Ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were the first to build a vocabulary for tyrants and the forms of government they corrupted. Thirteenth century analyses of tyranny by Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury, revived from Antiquity, were recast as short observations about what tyrants do. They claimed that tyrants govern for their own advantage, not for the people. Tyrants could be usurpers, increase taxes, and live in luxury. The list of tyrannical actions grew over time, especially in periods of turmoil and civil war, often raising the question: When can a tyrant be legitimately deposed or killed? In offering a brief biography of these political philosophers, including Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bodin, and others, along with their views on tyrannical behavior, Orest Ranum reveals how the concept of tyranny has been shaped over time, and how it still persists in political thought to this day.

In the articles collected here Nancy Struever explores the basic assumption that rhetoric is not simply a bag of persuasive tricks, but functions, necessarily, as a mode of inquiry investigating not simply the mechanics of production and reception of discourse, but the psychological factors of reason and passion engaged by the assertion, modification, and contest of beliefs and dispositions of the civil communities. The first section looks both at contemporary historians employing rhetorical constructs and tactics and at contemporary accounts of the employment of rhetorical pedagogical material and theoretical texts in medieval and Renaissance cultural practices. The second set of articles considers change and continuity in the rhetorical exploitation's of genre forms in cultural programs, focuses on the strong reorientation of Classical forms of moral inquiry, on the ingenious use of the proverb, of etymology, of the exemplum, as well as on the changes in strategies in the theater, the novel, and art criticism. The final section deals with the strong historical interconnections of rhetoric with other disciplines: the motives and investigative tactics of medicine and rhetoric in the Renaissance and Early Modernity, and the shared interests and interwoven careers of rhetoric and law.

Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, a collection of lyric poems on sacred and profane love and other subjects, has traditionally been viewed as reflecting the conflicted nature of its author. However, award winning author Thomas E. Peterson argues that Petrarch’s Fragmenta is an ordered and coherent work unified by narrative and theological structures. By concentrating on the poem’s reliance on Christian tenets and distinguishing between author, narrator and character, Peterson exposes the underlying narrative and theological unity of the work. Building on recent Petrarch scholarship and broader studies of medieval poetics, poetic narrativity, and biblical intertextuality, Peterson conducts a rigorous examination of the Fragmenta’s poetic language. This combination of stylistic and philological analysis recasts Petrarch’s poetry in a new light revealing its radically innovative and liberating character.

When does Renaissance philosophy end, and Early Modern philosophy begin? Do Renaissance philosophers have something in common, which distinguishes them from Early Modern philosophers? And ultimately, what defines the modernity of the Early Modern period, and what role did the Renaissance play in shaping it? The answers to these questions are not just chronological. This book challenges traditional constructions of these periods, which partly reflect the prejudice that the Renaissance was a literary and artistic phenomenon, rather than a philosophical phase. The essays in this book investigate how the legacy of Renaissance philosophers persisted in the following centuries through the direct encounters of subsequent generations with Renaissance philosophical texts. This volume treats Early Modern philosophers as joining their predecessors as ‘conversation partners’: the ‘conversations’ in this book feature, among others, Girolamo Cardano and Henry More, Thomas Hobbes and Lorenzo Valla, Bernardino Telesio and Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Tommaso Campanella, Giulio Cesare Vanini and the anonymous Theophrastus redivivus.

One of the most challenging problems in the history of Western ideas stems from the emergence of Modernity out of the preceding period of the Latin Middle Ages. This volume develops and extends the insights of the noted scholar Thomas M. Izbicki into the so-called medieval/modern divide. The contributors include a wide array of eminent international scholars from the fields of History, Theology, Philosophy, and Political Science, all of whom explore how medieval ideas framed and shaped the thought of later centuries. This sometimes involved the evolution of intellectual principles associated with the definition and imposition of religious orthodoxy. Also addressed is the Great Schism in the Roman Church that set into question the foundations of ecclesiology. In the same era, philosophical and theoretical innovations reexamined conventional beliefs about metaphysics, epistemology and political life, perhaps best encapsulated by the fifteenth-century philosopher, theologian and political theorist Nicholas of Cusa.