Traditionally, the history of Ancient Greek literature ends with Antiquity: after the fall of Rome, the literary works in ancient Greek generally belong to the domain of the Byzantine Empire. However, after the Byzantine refugees restored the knowledge of Ancient Greek in the west during the early humanistic period (15th century), Italian scholars (and later their French, German, Spanish colleagues) started to use Greek, a purely literary language that no one spoke, for their own texts and poems. This habit persisted with various ups and downs throughout the centuries, according to the development of Greek studies in each country. The aim of this anthology - the first one of this kind - is to give a selective overview of this kind of humanistic poetry in Ancient Greek, embracing all major regions of Europe and trying to concentrate on remarkable pieces of important poets. The ultimate goal of the book is to shed light on an important and so far mostly neglected aspect of the European heritage.

Madame D'Aulnoy was one of the most widely-read and most popular authors of her time. Seeing Spain at a strange moment in her history, it is the end of a great age. The reader can judge the Spanish character from a witness who saw it.

This book is a novel attempt to understand humanism as a socially meaningful cultural idiom in late Renaissance East Central Europe. Through an exploration of geographical regions that are relatively little known to an English reading public, it argues that late sixteenth-century East Central Europe was culturally thriving and intellectually open in the period between Copernicus and Galileo. Humanism was a dominant cluster of shared intellectual practices and cultural values that brought a number of concrete benefits both to the social-climber intellectual and to the social elite. Two exemplary case studies illustrate this thesis in substantive detail, and highlight the ambivalences and difficulties court humanists routinely faced. The protagonists Johannes Sambucus and Andreas Dudith, both born in the Kingdom of Hungary, were two of the major humanists of the Habsburg court, central figures in cosmopolitan networks of men of learning and characteristic representatives of an Erasmian spirit that was struggling for survival in the face of confessionalisation. Through an analysis of their careers at court and a presentation of their self-fashioning as savants and courtiers, the book explores the social and political significance of their humanist learning and intellectual strategies.

A distinctive history of the traditions of reading and life in the Renaissance library, as seen in the texts of Renaissance intellectuals