This book opens up Cicero's work philosophically, taking us deeper into ancient ethical debates and into Cicero's own sceptical stance.

This book presents five of Cicero's courtroom defences, including the defence of Roscius, falsely accused of murdering his father; of the consul-elect Murena, accused of electoral bribery; and of Milo, for murdering Cicero's enemy Clodius.

Investigating the oeuvre of the Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), this collection is the first to make extensive use of the critical editions of Filelfo’s numerous writings – in particular of his Epistolarium, published in 2016 by Jeroen De Keyser, who also edited this volume. Uncovering a lot of new information not previously mentioned in the literature on Filelfo, twelve specialized scholars draw attention to long-neglected material, shedding new light on Filelfo’s intellectual endeavors and his literary journey between Greek and Latin. This illuminating collection offers historians of ideas as well as literary scholars and Neo-Latinists new inroads into Filelfo’s vast oeuvre, and through it to the world of Quattrocento humanism. Contributors include: Jean-Louis Charlet, Guy Claessens, Jeroen De Keyser, Tom Deneire, Ide François, James Hankins, Noreen Humble, Gary Ianziti, Han Lamers, David Marsh, John Monfasani, and Jan Papy.

This book explores Cicero’s moral and political philosophy with great attention to his life and thought as a whole. The author “thinks through” Cicero with a close reading of his most important philosophical writings. Nicgorski often resolves apparent tensions in Cicero’s thought that have posed obstacles to the appreciation of his practical philosophy. Some of the major tensions confronted are those between his Academic skepticism and apparent Stoicism, between his commitment to philosophy and to politics, rhetoric and oratory, and between his attachment to Greek philosophy and his profound engagement in Roman culture. Moreover, the key theme within Cicero’s writings is his intended recovery, within his Roman context, of both the Socratic focus on great questions of practical philosophy and Socratic skepticism. Cicero’s recovery of Socratic political philosophy in Roman garb is then the basis for recovery of Cicero as a notable political thinker relevant to our time and its problems.

A new explanation for the substantial changes of thought that occurred in early modern Europe.

The central theme in any history of texts and books must be that of change and renewal: Parchment that is written on, in one set of circumstances in late antiquity, may in the Early Middle Ages be scraped clean and written on again, leaving evidence of a civilization in which blank parchment is more valuable than ancient literature. A manuscript can be regarded as an archeological artifact, but unlike pieces of pottery or chips of flint, a manuscript has a voice. The 12 essays gathered here vary in subject from the transmission of ancient authors to the invention of the subject index and range in time from the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century to the Protestant reformation of the early sixteenth century. Diverse in subject and period, these essays are unified by the questions they pose and the methodology they employ in seeking answers. A common thread is the desire to discover what information the manuscripts can yield about the society that created them: how the great concordance to the Bible was compiled, how book production at the medieval university was organized, how a vernacular poet carried his songs. Each surviving manuscript exists not only by the decision of the original maker but as a result of subsequent owners, who made notes, entered corrections, added an index composed a continuation. Changing times brought new uses for old texts changes that are reflected, like personal and cultural fingerprints, in glosses, marginalia, even the chain marks showing how the book was kept in the medieval library.