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Hans Holbein
The Artist in a Changing World
Jeanne Nuechterlein
Reaktion Books, 2020
Immensely skillful and inventive, Hans Holbein molded his approach to art-making during a period of dramatic transformation in European society and culture: the emergence of humanism, the impact of the Reformation on religious life, and the effects of new scientific discoveries. Most people have encountered Holbein’s work—think of King Henry VIII and Holbein’s memorable portrait springs to mind, forever defining the Tudor king for posterity—but little is widely known about the artist himself. This overview of Holbein looks at his art through the changes in the world around him. Offering insightful and often surprising new interpretations of visual and historical sources that have rarely been addressed, Jeanne Nuechterlein reconstructs what we know of the life of this elusive figure, illuminating the complexity of his world and the images he generated.
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The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox
Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities
Stephen Jay Gould
Harvard University Press, 2011
In his final book, Gould offers a surprising and nuanced study of the complex relationship between our two great ways of knowing: science and the humanities, twin realms of knowledge that have been divided against each other for far too long.
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Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance
Eric Cochrane
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Second edition. A comprehensive survey of historical literature produced in Italy during the Renaissance; a major contribution which discusses hundreds of authors who wrote in Latin or Italian in all parts of Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 
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Historical Milton
Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England
Thomas Fulton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
John Milton's Commonplace Book is the only known political notebook of a radical polemicist writing during the English civil war, and the most extensive manuscript record of reading we have from any major English poet from this period. In this rethinking of a surprisingly neglected body of evidence, Thomas Fulton explores Milton's reading practices and the ways he used this reading in his writing. Fulton's close study of the Commonplace Book suggests that this reading record is far from the haphazard collection of notes that it first appears but is instead a program of research which had its own ideology that responded to the reading habits and practices of Milton's contemporaries. Created mostly in the late 1630s and during the overthrow of the Stuart government in the 1640s, Milton's reading notes yield a number of surprises, the most fundamental being a highly structured commitment to political history. Fulton explores the relationship between the manuscript author and his polemical persona, placing the Commonplace Book, the manuscript "Digression" to the History of Britain, and some wartime poems in revealing contrast to the printed political texts of this period.
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The Historical Renaissance
New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture
Edited by Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The Historical Renaissance both exemplifies and examines the most influential current in contemporary studies of the English Renaissance: the effort to analyze the interplay between literature, history, and politics. The broad and varied manifestations of that effort are reflected in the scope of this collection. Rather than merely providing a sampler of any single critical movement, The Historical Renaissance represents the range of ways scholars and critics are fusing what many would once have distinguished as "literary" and "historical" concerns

The volume includes studies of mid-Tudor culture as well as of Elizabethan and Stuart periods.
The scope of the collection is also manifest in its list of contributors. They include historians and literary critics, and their work spans he spectrum from more traditional methods to those characteristic of what has been termed "New Historicism."One aim of the book is to investigate the apparent division between these older and more current approaches. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier evaluate the contemporary interest in historical studies of the Renaissance, relating it to previous developments in the field, surveying its achievements and limitations, and suggesting new directions for future work.
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History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning
Nancy G. Siraisi
University of Michigan Press, 2007

A major, path-breaking work, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning is Nancy G. Siraisi's examination into the intersections of medically trained authors and history in the period 1450 to 1650. Rather than studying medicine and history as separate disciplinary traditions, Siraisi calls attention to their mutual interaction in the rapidly changing world of Renaissance erudition. Far from their contributions being a mere footnote in the historical record, medical writers had extensive involvement in the reading, production, and shaping of historical knowledge during this important period. With remarkably detailed scholarship, Siraisi investigates doctors' efforts to explore the legacies handed down to them from ancient medical and anatomical writings and the difficult reconciliations this required between the authority of the ancient world and the discoveries of the modern. She also studies the ways in which sixteenth-century medical authors wrote history, both in their own medical texts and in more general historical works. In the course of her study, Siraisi finds that what allowed medical writers to become so fully engaged in the writing of history was their general humanistic background, their experience of history through the field of medicine's past, and the tools that the writing of history offered to the development of a rapidly evolving profession.

Nancy G. Siraisi is one of the preeminent scholars of medieval and Renaissance intellectual history, specializing in medicine and science. Now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a 2008 winner of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she has written numerous books, including Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils (Princeton, 1981), which won the American Association for the History of Medicine William H. Welch Medal; Avicenna in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1987); The Clock and the Mirror (Princeton, 1997); and the widely used textbook Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990), which won the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. In 2003 Siraisi received the History of Science Society's George Sarton Medal, in 2004 she received the Paul Oskar Kristellar Award for Lifetime Achievement of the Renaissance Society of America, and in 2005 she was awarded the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction.

"A fascinating study of Renaissance physicians as avid readers and enthusiastic writers of all kinds of history: from case narratives and medical biographies to archaeological and environmental histories. In this wide-ranging book, Nancy Siraisi demonstrates the deep links between the medical and the humanistic disciplines in early modern Europe."
---Katharine Park, Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University

"This is a salient but little explored aspect of Renaissance humanism, and there is no doubt that Siraisi has succeeded in throwing light onto a vast subject. The scholarship is wide-ranging and profound, and breaks new ground. The choice of examples is fascinating, and it puts Renaissance documents into a new context. This is a major book, well written, richly learned and with further implications for more than students of medical history."
---Vivian Nutton, Professor, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, and author of From Democedes to Harvey: Studies in the History of Medicine

"Siraisi shows the many-dimensioned overlaps and interactions between medicine and 'history' in the early modern period, marking a pioneering effort to survey a neglected discipline. Her book follows the changing usage of the classical term 'history' both as empiricism and as a kind of scholarship in the Renaissance before its more modern analytical and critical applications. It is a marvel of erudition in an area insufficiently studied."
---Donald R. Kelley, Emeritus James Westfall Thompson Professor of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and Executive Editor of Journal of the History of Ideas

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A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature
Volume I: Earlier Renaissance
Paul Holberton
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021
A bold, in-depth analysis of the pastoral form in writing and art.

A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature is an unprecedented exploration of the pastoral through the close examination of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature, and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, and English, as well as of a wide range of visual imagery. The book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the eighteenth century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail.  

The book begins with Virgil’s use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Paul Holberton then moves through a remarkable range of works, addressing authors such as Petrarch, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and artists such as Giorgione, Claude, Poussin, Watteau, Gainsborough, and many more. The book serves simultaneously as a careful study, an art book full of beautiful reproductions, and an anthology, presenting all texts both in the original language and in English translation.
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A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature
Volume II: Later Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassicism
Paul Holberton
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021
A bold, in-depth analysis of the pastoral form in writing and art.

A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature is an unprecedented exploration of the pastoral through the close examination of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature, and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, and English, as well as of a wide range of visual imagery. The book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the eighteenth century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail.  

The book begins with Virgil’s use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Paul Holberton then moves through a remarkable range of works, addressing authors such as Petrarch, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and artists such as Giorgione, Claude, Poussin, Watteau, Gainsborough, and many more. The book serves simultaneously as a careful study, an art book full of beautiful reproductions, and an anthology, presenting all texts both in the original language and in English translation. 
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History of Old Age
From Antiquity to the Renaissance
Georges Minois
University of Chicago Press, 1990
History of Old Age is the first major study of the ways in which old age has been perceived in western culture throughout history. Georges Minois paints a vast fresco, starting with the first old man to relate his own story—an Egyptian scribe some 4500 years ago—and ending with the deaths of Elizabeth I and Henry IV in the sixteenth century. Tracing the changing conceptions of the nature, value, and burden of the old, Minois argues that western history during this period is marked by great fluctuation in the social and political role of the aged.

Minois shows how, in ancient Greece, the cult of youth and beauty on the one hand, and the reverence for the figure of the Homeric sage, on the other, created an ambivalent attitude toward the aged. This ambiguity appears again in the contrast between the active role that older citizens played in Roman politics and their depiction in satirical literature of the period. Christian literature in the Middle Ages also played a large part in defining society's perception of the old, both in the image of the revered holy sage and in the total condemnation of the aged sinner.

Drawing on literary texts throughout, Minois considers the interrelation of literary, religious, medical, and political factors in determining the social fate of the elderly and their relationship to society. This book will be of great interest to social and cultural historians, as well as to general readers interested in the subject of the aged in society today.
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History of Political Ideas, Volume 4 (CW22)
Renaissance and Reformation
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by David L. Morse & William M. Thompson
University of Missouri Press, 1998

By closely examining the sources, movements, and persons of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Voegelin reveals the roots of today's political ideologies in this fourth volume of his History of Political Ideas. This insightful study lays the groundwork for Voegelin's critique of the modern period and is essential to an understanding of his later analysis.

Voegelin identifies not one but two distinct beginnings of the movement toward modern political consciousness: the Renaissance and the Reformation. Historically, however, the powerful effects of the second have overshadowed the first. In this book, Voegelin carefully examines both periods and their presence in modern thought.

The Renaissance, represented by the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, and Thomas More, is characterized by a struggle for balance. Machiavelli and Erasmus both looked to a virtuous prince to achieve order, one calling for brute force and the other for Christian spirituality to reach their goal. Also a participant in the first beginning of modernity, More was a complex thinker identified as a saint both of the church and of the communist movement. The issues he explored in Utopia, as Voegelin demonstrates, indirectly gave rise to concepts that have profoundly affected Western history: colonization, imperialism, national socialism, and communism.

Exploring the transition from the Renaissance to the Reformation is a brilliant chapter, "The People of God," which examines the sectarian movement. These pages contain the rich historical background that led to Voegelin's later conclusions about Gnosticism and its modern influences.

Voegelin offers a controversial view of the Reformation as well as the political and religious situation directly preceding it. Yet he sheds light on the strengths and inadequacies of its key figures, Martin Luther and John Calvin. The driving force behind the Reformation stemmed solely from the powerful personality of Luther. What began as an abstract, purely technical discussion developed into a full-blown revolt. Later in the period, Calvin confronted the problems left behind by Luther and endeavored to create his own universal church to supplant the Catholic Church. His theory of a new elite would have a distinct impact on history.

By examining the political ideas that first emerged during the Renaissance and Reformation, this fascinating volume provides a foundation for understanding the events of centuries to follow.

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A History of Private Life
Roger Chartier
Harvard University Press
Readers interested in history, and in the development of the modern sensibility, will relish this large-scale yet intimately detailed examination of the blossoming of the ordinary and extraordinary people of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This third in the popular five-volume series celebrates the emergence of individualism and the manifestations of a burgeoning self-consciousness over three centuries.
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History of the Florentine People
Leonardo BruniEdited and translated by James Hankinswith D. J. W. Bradley
Harvard University Press, 2001

Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), the leading civic humanist of the Italian Renaissance, served as apostolic secretary to four popes (1405-1414) and chancellor of Florence (1427-1444). He was famous in his day as a translator, orator, and historian, and was the best-selling author of the fifteenth century. Bruni's History of the Florentine People in twelve books is generally considered the first modern work of history, and was widely imitated by humanist historians for two centuries after its official publication by the Florentine Signoria in 1442.

This third volume concludes the edition, the first to make the work available in English translation. It includes Bruni's Memoirs, an autobiographical account of the events of his lifetime, and cumulative indexes to the complete History.

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History of the Florentine People
Leonardo BruniEdited and translated by James Hankins
Harvard University Press, 2001
Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), the leading civic humanist of the Italian Renaissance, served as apostolic secretary to four popes (1405-1414) and chancellor of Florence (1427-1444). He was famous in his day as a translator, orator, and historian, and was the best-selling author of the fifteenth century. Bruni's History of the Florentine People in twelve books is generally considered the first modern work of history, and was widely imitated by humanist historians for two centuries after its official publication by the Florentine Signoria in 1442. This edition makes it available for the first time in English translation.
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History of the Florentine People
Leonardo BruniEdited and translated by James Hankins
Harvard University Press, 2001
Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), the leading civic humanist of the Italian Renaissance, served as apostolic secretary to four popes (1405-1414) and chancellor of Florence (1427-1444). He was famous in his day as a translator, orator, and historian, and was the best-selling author of the fifteenth century. Bruni's History of the Florentine People in twelve books is generally considered the first modern work of history, and was widely imitated by humanist historians for two centuries after its official publication by the Florentine Signoria in 1442. This edition makes it available for the first time in English translation.
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A History of the Swedish People
Volume II: From Renaissance to Revolution
Vilhelm Moberg
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In the second volume of his vivid history of the Swedes, Vilhelm Moberg brings his focus on the common people to bear on a period that included two dramatic revolts: the national insurrection under Engelbrekt and the last desperate attempt of the Smaland peasantry to retain their medieval liberties - a defiance bloodily crushed by King Gustav Vasa. Using a wide variety of local historical source materials, Moberg studies the ruthless monarch Vasa and his two tragic opponents: the psychopathic Christian II of Denmark and Nils Dracke, the leader of the Smalanders. Furthermore, he examines the enigmatic and wide appeal of the Swedish forest and investigates the origins of the Swedish hatred of Danes, which was implanted by propaganda through songs commissioned by Karl VIII's chancellery.Moberg's history has been widely hailed by the Swedish press as a masterpiece of popular history writing and has been an all-time best-seller in Swedish bookstores.
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History of Venice
Pietro BemboEdited and translated by Robert W. Ulery, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2007
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. His early dialogue on the subject of love greatly influenced the development of the literary vernacular, as did his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). From 1513 to 1521, he served Pope Leo X as Latin secretary and became known as the leading advocate of Ciceronian Latin in Europe and of the Tuscan dialect within Italy. He was named official historian of Venice in 1529 and began to compose in Latin his continuation of the city’s history in twelve books, covering the years from 1487 to 1513. Although the work chronicles internal politics and events, much of it is devoted to the external affairs of Venice, principally conflicts with other European states (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, and the papacy) and with the Turks in the East. The History of Venice was published after Bembo’s death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, completed by this third volume, makes it available for the first time in English translation.
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History of Venice
Pietro BemboEdited and translated by Robert W. Ulery, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2007
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. His early dialogue on the subject of love greatly influenced the development of the literary vernacular, as did his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). From 1513 to 1521 he served Pope Leo X as Latin secretary and became known as the leading advocate of Ciceronian Latin in Europe and of the Tuscan dialect within Italy. He was named official historian of Venice in 1529 and began to compose in Latin his continuation of the city’s history in twelve books, covering the years from 1487 to 1513. Although the work chronicles internal politics and events, much of it is devoted to the external affairs of Venice, principally conflicts with other European states (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, and the papacy) and with the Turks in the East. The History of Venice was published after Bembo’s death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, in a projected three volumes, makes it available for the first time in English translation.
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History of Women in the West
Georges Duby
Harvard University Press
Volume III of A History of Women draws a richly detailed picture of women in early modern Europe, considering them in a context of work, marriage, and family. At the heart of this volume is “woman” as she appears in a wealth of representations, from simple woodcuts and popular literature to master paintings; and as the focal point of a debate—sometimes humorous, sometimes acrimonious—conducted in every field: letters, arts, philosophy, the sciences, and medicine. Against oppressive experience, confining laws, and repetitious claims about female “nature,” women took initiative by quiet maneuvers and outright dissidence. In conformity and resistance, in image and reality, women from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries emerge from these pages in remarkable diversity.
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Hostile Humor in Renaissance France
Bruce Hayes
University of Delaware Press, 2011

In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire appeared.

This study examines both pamphlets and plays to show how this new form of humor emerged that attacked religious practices and people in ways that forever changed the nature of satire and religious debate in France. Hayes explores this phenomenon in the context of the Catholic and Protestant conflict to reveal new insights about the society that both exploited and vilified this kind of satire.

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How to Do It
Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians
Rudolph M. Bell
University of Chicago Press, 1999
How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires, throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social history.

"Lively and curious reading, particularly in its cascade of anecdote, offered in a breezy, cozy, journalistic style." —Lauro Martines, Times Literary Supplement

"[Bell's] fascinating book is a window on a lost world far nearer to our own than we might imagine. . . . How pleasant to read his delightful, informative and often hilarious book." —Kate Saunders, The Independent

"An extraordinary work which blends the learned with the frankly bizarre." —The Economist

"Professor Bell has a sly sense of humor and an enviably strong stomach. . . . He wants to know how people actually behaved, not how the Church or philosophers or earnest humanists thought they should behave. I loved this book." —Christopher Stace, Daily Telegraph
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Humanism and the Latin Classics
Aldus Manutius
Harvard University Press, 2017
Aldus Manutius (c. 1451–1515) was the most important and innovative scholarly publisher of the Renaissance. His Aldine Press was responsible for more first editions of classical literature, philosophy, and science than any other publisher before or since. A companion volume to I Tatti’s The Greek Classics (2016), Humanism and the Latin Classics presents all of Aldus’s prefaces to his editions of works by ancient Latin and modern humanist writers, translated for the first time into English, along with other illustrative writings by Aldus and his collaborators. They provide unique insight into the world of scholarly publishing in Renaissance Venice.
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Humanist Educational Treatises
Translated by Craig W. Kallendorf
Harvard University Press, 2008

The disciplines now known as the humanities emerged in their modern form during the Italian Renaissance as the result of an educational movement begun by humanist teachers, writers, and scholars in the early fourteenth century. These educators argued for the usefulness of classical literature as an instrument for training young men and women, not only in the arts of language and eloquence, but also in civic virtue and practical wisdom.

This volume provides new translations, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, of four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists’ efforts to reform medieval education: Pier Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth”; Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature”; Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), “The Education of Boys”; and Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning.”

The original text of these four documents with Craig W. Kallendorf’s translation is also available in a facing-page edition.

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Humanist Educational Treatises
Edited and translated by Craig W. Kallendorf
Harvard University Press, 2002

The cycle of disciplines now known as the humanities emerged in their modern form during the Italian Renaissance as the result of an educational movement begun by humanist teachers, writers, and scholars of the early Quattrocento. The movement argued for the usefulness of classical literature as an instrument for training young men and women, not only in the arts of language and eloquence, but also in civic virtue and practical wisdom. This volume contains four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists’ efforts to reform medieval education.

The four texts are Pier Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth”; Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature”; Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), “The Education of Boys”; and Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning.” The Vergerio and Guarino texts appear in English for the first time.

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Humanist Tragedies
Gary R. Grund
Harvard University Press, 2011

Humanist Tragedies, like its companion volume Humanist Comedies (ITRL 19), contains a representative sampling of Latin drama written during the Tre- and Quattrocento. The five tragedies included in this volume—Albertino Mussato’s Ecerinis (1314), Antonio Loschi’s Achilleis (ca. 1387), Gregorio Corraro’s Progne (ca. 1429), Leonardo Dati’s Hyempsal (ca. 1442), and Marcellino Verardi’s Fernandus servatus (1493)—were nourished by a potent amalgam of classical, medieval, and pre-humanist sources.

Just as Latin humanist comedy depended heavily upon Plautus and Terence, humanist tragedy drew its inspiration primarily from the nine plays of Seneca. Dramatists also used ancient legends or contemporary history as source material, dramatizing them as Seneca might have done. Some even attempted to outdo Seneca, exaggerating the bloody sensationalism, the bombastic rhetoric, and the insistence on retributive justice for which he was famous.

Unlike comedy, which drew its narratives from ordinary life and from love, sex, money, and manners, tragedy was not concerned with human foibles but with distant tragic heroes. The impossible choices faced by larger-than-life men and women whose heroic destinies hung in the balance gave tragedy a considerably shorter shelf-life than comedies. While comedy stayed relevant, tragedy became problematic, evolving into the hybrid genre of tragicomedy by the end of the Quattrocento. Humanist tragedy testifies to the momentous changes in literary and cultural conventions that occurred during the Renaissance.

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Humanists and Jurists
Six Studies in the Renaissance
Myron P. Gilmore
Harvard University Press

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The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation
Erika Rummel
Harvard University Press

In the last half of the fifteenth century, the classic Platonic debate over the respective merits of rhetoric and philosophy was replayed in the debate between humanists and scholastics over philology and dialectic. The intense dispute between representatives of the two camps fueled many of the most important intellectual developments of the Renaissance and Reformation. Erika Rummel delves into the extensive primary sources of the times, bringing the issues and their continuing legacy to light and making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the intellectual climate of early modern Europe.

Rummel demonstrates how the passionately fought issue of the period changed focus as humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus applied philological skills to Scripture. The controversy over form versus content entered a new phase, pitting humanists trained as philologists against scholastic theologians trained as dialecticians. Rummel shows us the framework for the debate still intact as the medium/message dichotomy, and traces its development into quarrels over qualification and entitlement in the academy, as theologians and humanists disputed the intellectual and territorial boundaries of their respective disciplines. Finally, in the first half of the sixteenth century we see the controversy entering the sphere of doctrinal dispute. The question of authority became centered not only on professional competence but also on the more explosive issues of faith and Christian teaching.

This in-depth study will reclaim the attention of those who believe these debates were merely personal and episodic; Rummel's innovative research provides ample evidence that the polemics of the age arose from a fundamental conflict over methodology and the freedom to pursue research.

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Humoring the Body
Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage
Gail Kern Paster
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.

Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.
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The Hussites
Stephen E. Lahey
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
The Hussite movement was a historical watershed – popular and scholastic theology combined with a nascent Czech nationalism to produce a full-scale social revolution that presaged the Reformation and the birth of the modern nation state. The Hussites defeated the Empire and the Pope, and their king George Poděbrady advocated a trans-national European state. Hussite theology influenced Martin Luther and the birth of Protestantism. This survey introduces the reader to the events, people, and ideas that define this remarkable movement.
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Huygens and Hofwijck
The Inventive World of Constantijn and Christiaan Huygens
Kees van der Leer
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Constantijn Huygens was a poet, composer and connoisseur of art and the classics. He was also secretary and confidant to three princes of Orange for 62 years. Hofwijck was also the place where Constantijn’s son Christiaan spent a significant part of his life. Christiaan Huygens was a member of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge and became one of the greatest inventors and scientists. At the end of his life, at Hofwijck, he wrote Cosmotheoros, his magnum opus on the universe. At Huygens’s Hofwijck we look at the seventeenth century through the eyes of these two versatile men. With Constantijn and Christiaan, the story is about literature, art, music, politics, the House of Orange, science and life at a seventeenth-century country estate.
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