In 'Setting Plato Straight', Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations.

In Renaissance Italy there existed a rich interplay between two cultural practices frequently regarded as entirely separate and mutually antagonistic: the humanistic study of the ancient world and ancient literature, and the oral and improvisational performance of poetry, which constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment. A Sudden Frenzy explores the development and impact of these Renaissance practices of improvisation and oral poetry. James K. Coleman shows how the confluence of humanist culture and the art of oral poetry resulted in an extraordinary turn toward improvisation and spontaneity that profoundly influenced poetry, music, and politics. By examining the culture of improvisation, this book reveals the ways in which Renaissance thinkers transcended cultural dichotomies, both in theory and in practice. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including letters, poetry, visual art, and philosophical texts, A Sudden Frenzy reveals the far-reaching and sometimes surprising ways that these phenomena shaped cultural developments in the Italian Renaissance and beyond.

This writing textbook bridges factual, critical, and expressive modes of writing to help students develop a reflective sense of why and how to write for university, professional, and public audiences. Exploring the ways in which writing builds tools for argument both in and beyond the university, it enables students to break out of the dusty and formulaic patterns of writing that too often threaten to render academic studies irrelevant. In a playful, personal, essayistic style, it examines existing academic writing methods and develops new modes of narrative-based expression rooted in the humanities. Reflective analysis invites emerging writers to self-consciously craft convincing and impassioned writing practices using an expanded methodological toolbox. It aims to imbue academic writing with the expressive potential of artistic research by transforming existing methods of articulating analysis within a broader expressive system, developing skills more typical of creative writing, such as providing a setting, considering frame, engaging emotions, expansion, and concision. If we believe in the value of our thoughts, discoveries, and arguments, we must enable them to sing. Loving Writing can be used as a textbook for advanced or introductory college writing courses and provides innovative guidance to liberal arts students seeking to develop their writing abilities.

Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across inequalities of class and race. The friendships that seem to have exerted an analogous level of fascination in early modern France were those that defied the assumption, inherited from Aristotle and patristic sources, that friendships between men and women were impossible. Together, the essays in Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. The revival of Plato’s friendship texts in the sixteenth century challenged Aristotle’s rigid ideal of perfect friendship between men. In the seventeenth century, a new imperative of heterosociality opened a space for the cultivation of cross-gender friendships, while the spiritual friendships of the Catholic Reformation modeled relationships that transcended the gendered dynamics of galanterie. Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France argues that the imaginative experimentation in friendships between men and women was a distinctive feature of early modern French culture. The ten essays in this volume address friend-making as a process that is creative of self and responsive to changing social and political circumstances. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of friendship are magnified when gender roles and relations are unsettled, the essays in this volume highlight the relevance of early modern friend-making to friendship in the contemporary world.

Forbidden Desire is a pioneering study of the history of male-male sex in the whole of Early Modern Europe, including the European colonies and the Ottoman world.

This book introduces methodological concepts aimed at including women in the canon of the history of philosophy. The history of women philosophers is as long and strong as the history of philosophy, and this holds true not only for the European tradition, as the research of women philosophers of the past shows. The phenomenon of ignoring and excluding women in 19th and 20th century views on the history of philosophy was a result of the patriarchal tradition that ostracized women in general. In this book, leading feminist philosophers discuss methodologies for including women thinkers in the canon and curricula of philosophy. How does the recovery of women thinkers and their philosophies change our view of the past, and how does a different view of the past affect us in the present? Studying a richer and more pluralistic history of philosophy presents us with worlds we have never entered and have never been able to approach. This book will appeal to philosophers and intellectual historians wanting to view the history of philosophy in a new light and who are in favor of an inclusive perspective on that history.