Professor Gilmore’s six studies include one on Renaissance historical philosophy, one on how far Renaissance individualism applied to Renaissance historians, one on lawyers and the Church, two on Erasmus, and one on Erasmus’ friend and disciple, Amerbach… All six essays are at a high standard of scholarship and of interest. Professor Gilmore is much at home with lawyers, as much as with humanists and historians.
-- The Historian
The over-all title of this volume only partially conveys the scope of the six illuminating and provocative essays…that Professor Gilmore has devoted to the subject of new attitudes toward history in the Renaissance…the author pursues two closely related themes: the contrasting strains within humanism itself in regard to the nature and function of history, strains held in somewhat uneasy synthesis; the contributions of the lawyers to the new historical attitude emerging as a by-product of the humanist attack upon them… These central themes by no means exhaust the rich fare offered in Gilmore’s masterly essays. A small book of far-reaching content, it should not be missed by any student of the Renaissance.
-- American Historical Review
In these six studies Professor Gilmore views from several points the changing relation between humanists and jurists from the time of Petrarch in the mid-fourteenth century to that of Boniface Amerbach, the friend and heir of Erasmus, at the height of the Protestant Reformation…the book offers a new look at the legal profession and particularly at the role of the different elements of a lawyer’s education.
-- Harvard Law Review
