The Latin Poems of Manilius Cabacius Rallus of Sparta presents the poetic oeuvre of a forgotten poet of Renaissance Rome. A Greek by birth, Manilius Cabacius Rallus (c. 1447–c. 1523) spent most of his life far from his motherland, unable to return. Through his poems, composed in a range of metres and genres, Rallus engaged with some major events and personalities of his time, including Angelo Poliziano, Ianus Lascaris, and Pope Leo X. His poems also reflect on timeless human experiences such as helplessness in the face of fortune and nostalgia for what is lost. Han Lamers edited the Latin text of Rallus’ poems (most of them printed for the last time in 1520) and added annotations and an English prose translation.

The late Byzantine period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) was marked by both cultural fecundity and political fragmentation, resulting in an astonishingly multifaceted literary output. This book addresses the poetry of the empire’s final quarter-millennium from a broad perspective, bringing together studies on texts originating in places from Crete to Constantinople and from court to school, treating topics from humanist antiquarianism to pious self-help, and written in styles from the vernacular to Homeric language. It thus offers a reference work to a much-neglected but rich textual material that is as varied as it was potent in the sociocultural contexts of its times. Contributors are Theodora Antonopoulou, Marina Bazzani, Julián Bértola, Martin Hinterberger, Krystina Kubina, Marc D. Lauxtermann, Florin Leonte, Ugo Mondini, Brendan Osswald, Giulia M. Paoletti, Cosimo Paravano, Daniil Pleshak, Alberto Ravani, and Federica Scognamiglio.

presents the poetic oeuvre of a forgotten poet of Renaissance Rome, edited by Han Lamers, with helpful annotations and an English prose translation.

In Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524) and Renaissance Alchemy, Matteo Soranzo offers the first in-depth study of the life and works of Augurello, Italian alchemist, poet and art connoisseur from the time of Giorgione. Analysed, annotated and translated into English for the first time, Augurello’s poetry reveals a unique blend of late medieval alchemical doctrines, Northern Italian antiquarianism and Marsilio Ficino’s Platonism, enriching conventional narratives of Renaissance humanism.

An authoritative account of the intellectual and educational history of the late Italian Renaissance. Twenty essays on major themes, institutions, and persons of the Italian Renaissance by one of its most distinguished living historians.

Uberto Decembrio’s Four Books on the Commonwealth (De re publica libri IV, ca. 1420), edited and translated by Paolo Ponzù Donato, is one of the earliest examples of the reception of Plato’s Republic in the fifteenth century. The humanistic dialogue provides an illuminating insight into such themes as justice, the best government, the morals of the prince and citizen, education, and religion. Decembrio’s dialogue is dedicated to Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, the ‘worst enemy’ of Florence. Making use of literary and documentary sources, Ponzù Donato convincingly proves that Decembrio’s thought, which shares many points with the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni, belongs to the same world of Civic Humanism.

As the University of Erfurt collapsed in the early 1520s, Hessus faced losing his livelihood. To cope, he imagined himself a shape-changing Proteus. Transforming first into a lawyer, then a physician, he finally became a teacher at the Nuremberg academy organized by Philip Melanchthon. Volume 5 traces this story via Hessus's poems of 1524-1528: "Some Rules for Preserving Good Health" (1524; 1531), with attached "Praise of Medicine" and two sets of epigrams; "Three Elegies" (1526), two praising the Nuremberg school and one attacking a criticaster; "Venus Triumphant" (1527), with poems on Joachim Camerarius’s wedding; "Against the Hypocrisy of the Monastic Habit" (1527), with four Psalm paraphrases; and "Seventeen Bucolic Idyls" (1528), updating the "Bucolicon" of 1509 and adding five idyls.