A fresh English translation of five Alberti works that illuminate new aspects of the literary aims and development of the first “Renaissance man.”
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was one of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. His extraordinary range of abilities as a writer, architect, art theorist, and even athlete earned him the controversial title of the first “Renaissance man.”
The works collected in Biographical and Autobiographical Writings reflect Alberti’s lived experiences and his interests in the genre. This volume includes On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, which partly reflects his experiences as a student in Bologna; The Life of St. Potitus, the biography of a Christian martyr, which also contains autobiographical projections and was to have been the first in a series of lives of saints; My Dog, a mock funeral oration for his dead dog; My Life, one of the first autobiographies of the early modern period and the main source for Jacob Burckhardt’s portrait of Alberti; and a comic encomium, The Fly. In particular, the last three works—My Dog, My Life, and The Fly—constitute a kind of trilogy, as the humanist finds one of his main themes, the portrait of the ideal life, with a strong emphasis on humor.
This edition presents the first collected English translations of these works alongside an authoritative Latin text.
Two French Protestant refugees in eighteenth-century Amsterdam gave the world an extraordinary work that intrigued and outraged readers across Europe. In this captivating account, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt take us to the vibrant Dutch Republic and its flourishing book trade to explore the work that sowed the radical idea that religions could be considered on equal terms.
Famed engraver Bernard Picart and author and publisher Jean Frederic Bernard produced The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, which appeared in the first of seven folio volumes in 1723. They put religion in comparative perspective, offering images and analysis of Jews, Catholics, Muslims, the peoples of the Orient and the Americas, Protestants, deists, freemasons, and assorted sects. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, the work was a resounding success. For the next century it was copied or adapted, but without the context of its original radicalism and its debt to clandestine literature, English deists, and the philosophy of Spinoza.
Ceremonies and Customs prepared the ground for religious toleration amid seemingly unending religious conflict, and demonstrated the impact of the global on Western consciousness. In this beautifully illustrated book, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt cast new light on the profound insight found in one book as it shaped the development of a modern, secular understanding of religion.
The Byzantine Sinbad collects The Book of Syntipas the Philosopher and The Fables of Syntipas, both translated from Syriac in the late eleventh century by the scholar Michael Andreopoulos.
Originally written in Persian and part of a multilingual and multicultural medieval storytelling tradition, The Book of Syntipas recounts how the Persian king Cyrus’s unnamed son—a student of the fictional philosopher Sinbad, who is known in Greek as Syntipas—is falsely accused of rape by a royal concubine. While the young man awaits execution, seven philosophers and the concubine attempt to influence Cyrus’s judgment. After seven days of storytelling, the son is exonerated and demonstrates the wisdom he learned from Syntipas.
The sixty-two moral tales in The Fables of Syntipas are inspired mainly by the tradition of Aesop but include fifteen that are uniquely attributed to the philosopher.
This volume is the first English translation to bring together Andreopoulos’s Byzantine Greek texts.
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