The arrival of the printing press -- Humanist scholarship and editorial guidance -- Augustine after Trent -- How to find the right argument : bibliographies and indexes -- Customizing authority : anthologies and epitomes -- How readers read their Augustines -- Patristics and public debate.

Augustine and the Humanists investigates the reception of Augustine’s De civitate Dei in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Augustine and the Humanists fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine’s oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the urgent call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, the De civitate Dei, has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the City of God at the dawn of the modern age. Augustine and the Humanists focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.

Despite the high regard in which Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) held St. Augustine, scholars have been inclined to view Augustine’s impact on the content of Petrarch’s thought rather lightly. Wedded to the ancient classics, and prioritising literary imitation over intellectual coherence, Petrarch is commonly thought to have made inconsistent use of St. Augustine’s works. Adopting an entirely fresh approach, however, this book argues that Augustine’s early writings consistently provided Petrarch with the conceptual foundations of his approach to moral questions, and with a model for integrating classical precepts into a coherent Christian framework. As a result, this book offers a challenging re-interpretation of Petrarch’s humanism, and offers a provocative new interpretation of his role in the development of Italian humanism.

Augustine of Hippo, indisputably one of the most important figures for the study of memory, is credited with establishing memory as the inner source of selfhood and locus of the search for God. Yet, those who study memory in Augustine have never before taken into account his preaching. His sermons are the sources of memory's greatest development for Augustine. In Augustine's preaching, especially on the Psalms, the interior gives way to communal exterior. Both the self and search for God are re-established in a shared Christological identity and the communal labors of remembering and forgetting. This book opens with Augustine's early works and Confessions as the beginning of memory and concludes with Augustine's Trinity and preaching on Psalm 50 as the end of memory. The heart of the book, the work of memory, sets forth how ongoing remembering and forgetting in Christ are for Augustine are foundational to the life of grace. To that end, Augustine and his congregants go leaping in memory together, keep festival with abiding traces, and become forgetful runners like St. Paul. Remembering and forgetting in Christ, the ongoing work of memory, prove for Augustine to be actions of reconciliation of the distended experiences of human life-of praising and groaning, labouring and resting, solitude and communion. Augustine on Memory presents this new communal and Christological paradigm not only for Augustinian studies, but also for theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and interdisciplinary scholars of memory.

In late-Trecento Florence, the cradle of the Italian Renaissance, humanist and chancellor Coluccio Salutati found himself face to face with the “holy spirit” that was, to him, the influence of Augustine’s towering City of God – the Church Father’s masterly synthesis of late antique secular and religious thinking. Through an analysis of contextual elements and a close reading of Salutati’s major literary works, Sam Urlings brings to light the unexplored yet profoundly significant intertextual encounter that shaped Florentine thinking on the culpability of Lucretia, the active and contemplative life, divine foreknowledge, the nature of government, and the theological power of poetry. In doing so, Coluccio Salutati and Augustine’s City of God challenges previously held assumptions regarding Renaissance “Augustinianism” on the one hand, and the chancellor’s civically-engaged thinking on the other, proposing a new, synthetic vision that allows for Salutati to illuminate and defend his faith while engaging intensely with the pressing political issues of his time.

Augustine and the Humanists' fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine's oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the urgent call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine's works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine's major works, 'De civitate Dei', has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the 'City of God' at the dawn of the modern age. 'Augustine and the Humanists' focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.

After two introductory chapters on the humanist and scholastic Aristotelian traditions, the author devotes thirteen chapters to the positions taken by various influential participants in the debates on Humanism versus Scholasticism. Included in this close analysis are: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, Politian, and others.