A classic, Dantesque political epic from medieval Spain that inspired Cervantes and Góngora, in its first English translation.

Why do the injustices of the past still afflict the present? With this question, Juan de Mena is transported to heaven by a vision in the Dantesque The Labyrinth of Fortune. Composed in 1444 by Mena, a royal chronicler and Latin secretary in the court of Juan II of Castile, El Laberinto de Fortuna became the most important political allegory of medieval Spain. Allegorizing the past, present, and unknowable future through the figure of Providence, the poem reflects on the contentious kingship of Juan II and frames the Reconquest of Moorish territories—the foundational mythos of the emerging nation—as a virtuous, sacred task that would restore justice and the moral order because it fulfills a destiny ordained by God. This is the first English translation of a masterpiece that enriched the Spanish language with a density of learned allusions and a new Latinate humanistic style that deeply influenced subsequent writers such as Miguel Cervantes and Luis de Góngora.

“Trenchant and moving.”—Robert Boyers, Los Angeles Times

The inexhaustible man of letters directs his critical gaze at his own profession—teaching.

When we talk about education today, we tend to avoid the rhetoric of “mastery,” with its erotic and inegalitarian overtones. But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests George Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of power, trust, and passions in the most profound sorts of pedagogy. Based on Steiner's 2001–2002 Norton Lectures on the art and lore of teaching, Lessons of the Masters evokes a host of exemplary figures, including Socrates and Plato, Virgil and Dante, Heloise and Abelard, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, along with spiritual leaders from Buddhist and Confucian sages to Jesus and the Baal Shem Tov.

Pivotal in the unfolding of Western culture are Socrates and Jesus, charismatic masters who left no written teachings and founded no schools. In the efforts of their disciples—and in the passion narratives inspired by their deaths—Steiner sees the beginnings of the inward vocabulary, the encoded recognitions of much of our moral, philosophical, and theological idiom. He goes on to consider a diverse array of traditions and disciplines, returning throughout to three underlying themes: the master's power to exploit his student's dependence and vulnerability; the complementary threat of subversion and betrayal of the mentor by his pupil; and the reciprocal exchange of trust and love, of learning and instruction between master and disciple.

Forcefully written and passionately argued, Lessons of the Masters is itself a masterly testament to the high vocation and perilous risks undertaken by true teacher and learner alike.

The Oration by philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), to which later editors added the subtitle On the Dignity of Man, is the most famous text written in Italy at the height of the Renaissance. The Life of Giovanni by Gianfrancesco Pico, his nephew, is the only contemporary account of the philosopher’s brief and astonishing career—Giovanni, who challenged anyone to debate him on nine hundred theses in Rome, whose writings made him a heretic by papal declaration, died at the age of thirty-one. Together, these works record Giovanni’s invention of Christian Kabbalah, his search for the ancient theology of Orpheus and Zoroaster, and his effort to reconcile all the warring schools of philosophy in universal concord. In this new translation, the two texts are presented with ample explanatory notes that transform our understanding of these fascinating thinkers.