Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) is one of the most fascinating, if hitherto inaccessible, intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance. His work ranges across many of the intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political concerns of that tumultuous era. John Headley uses Campanella's life and works to open a window into this complex period. He not only explicates the frequently contradictory texts of a prolific author but also situates Campanella's writings amidst the larger currents of European thought. For all its obscurely magical and astrolgocial intricacies, Campanella's entire intellectual endeavor expresses an effort to impose a distinctive order and direction upon the major issues and forces of the age different from that which was shortly to prevail with the new Galilean science and the Leviathan state. In the process of identifying and engaging these issues and imparting in some instances something of his own, he managed to mobilize and deploy many of the salient principles of late medieval and Renaissance culture, often cast in a curiously modern hue and aligned with the new forces of the age. Indeed, modern and antique, new and old juxtapose violently in the person of this reformer who combines an encyclopedic comprehensiveness of intellect with an appalling intensity of will. He is a man who strove to destabilize the regnant forces of what he identified as tyranny, sophistry, and hypocrisy and to shake the world into a new order. In this book, Headley invites readers to look anew at this mercurial figure and at the turbulent times in which he lived. John M. Headley is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has authored studies of Luther, Thomas More, the Emperor Charles V, and San Carlo Borromeo. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) is one of the most fascinating, if hitherto inaccessible, intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance. His work ranges across many of the intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political concerns of that tumultuous era. John Headley uses Campanella's life and works to open a window into this complex period. He not only explicates the frequently contradictory texts of a prolific author but also situates Campanella's writings amidst the larger currents of European thought. For all its obscurely magical and astrolgocial intricacies, Campanella's entire intellectual endeavor expresses an effort to impose a distinctive order and direction upon the major issues and forces of the age different from that which was shortly to prevail with the new Galilean science and the Leviathan state. In the process of identifying and engaging these issues and imparting in some instances something of his own, he managed to mobilize and deploy many of the salient principles of late medieval and Renaissance culture, often cast in a curiously modern hue and aligned with the new forces of the age. Indeed, modern and antique, new and old juxtapose violently in the person of this reformer who combines an encyclopedic comprehensiveness of intellect with an appalling intensity of will. He is a man who strove to destabilize the regnant forces of what he identified as tyranny, sophistry, and hypocrisy and to shake the world into a new order. In this book, Headley invites readers to look anew at this mercurial figure and at the turbulent times in which he lived. John M. Headley is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has authored studies of Luther, Thomas More, the Emperor Charles V, and San Carlo Borromeo. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Europeanization of the World puts forward a defense of Western civilization and the unique gifts it has bequeathed to the world-in particular, human rights and constitutional democracy-at a time when many around the globe equate the West with hubris and thinly veiled imperialism. John Headley argues that the Renaissance and the Reformation provided the effective currents for the development of two distinctive political ideas. The first is the idea of a common humanity, derived from antiquity, developed through natural law, and worked out in the new emerging global context to provide the basis for today's concept of universal human rights. The second is the idea of political dissent, first posited in the course of the Protestant Reformation and later maturing in the politics of the British monarchy. Headley traces the development and implications of this first idea from antiquity to the present. He examines the English revolution of 1688 and party government in Britain and America into the early nineteenth century. And he challenges the now--common stance in historical studies of moral posturing against the West. Headley contends that these unique ideas are Western civilization's most precious export, however presently distorted. Certainly European culture has its dark side--Auschwitz is but one example. Yet as Headley shows, no other civilization in history has bequeathed so sustained a tradition of universalizing aspirations as the West. The Europeanization of the World makes an argument that is controversial but long overdue. Written by one of our preeminent scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation, this elegantly reasoned book is certain to spark a much-needed reappraisal of the Western tradition.

"The contributors pay particular attention to the role of the five intellectual virtues set forth by Aristotle in book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics - art, prudence, science, wisdom, and intellect - in modern philosophy."--BOOK JACKET.

Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's "The Raven" serve as case studies that demonstrate the authors' debt to the past. Focusing principally on the overlapping rhetorical and iconic assumptions of the Art of Memory and its relation to chiasmus, Engel avoids engaging in a simple account of what these authors read and incorporated into their own writings. Instead, through an examination of their predisposition toward an earlier model of pattern recognition, he offers fresh insight into the writers' understandings of mourning and loss, their use of allegory, and what they gained from their use of pseudonyms.

It has been called “the most singular centaur that religion and science have ever produced” (Franz Boll). Astrology as a cultural form has puzzled and fascinated generations of humankind. It reached its apogee in the European Renaissance, when it flourished in literature, political expression, medicine, art, and all the other areas of endeavor catalogued in this unique collection. Brill’s Companion to Renaissance Astrology brings together a wide array of expertise from around the globe to explain the method and matter of this cultural form, including the Arab and Classical heritage, the medieval tradition, the clash with organized religion, the influence on knowledge and the competition with newly emerging ways of knowing, summarizing the current state of research and suggesting new paths. Contributors include: Giuseppe Bezza, Dieter Blume, Claudia Brosseder, Brendan Dooley, William Eamon, Ornella Faracovi, Hiro Hirai, Wolfgang Hübner, Eileen Reeves, Steven Vanden Broecke, and Graziella Federici Vescovini.

This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres – from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing – was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.