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Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror Patrick Baker (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin)

Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror By Patrick Baker (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin)

Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror by Patrick Baker (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin)


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Summary

This important study takes a new approach to understanding Italian Renaissance humanism, one of the most important cultural movements in Western history. Through a series of close textual studies, Patrick Baker explores the meaning that Italian Renaissance humanism had for an essential but neglected group: the humanists themselves.

Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror Summary

Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror by Patrick Baker (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin)

This important study takes a new approach to understanding Italian Renaissance humanism, based not on scholarly paradigms or philosophical concepts but on a neglected yet indispensable perspective: the humanists' understanding of themselves. Through a series of close textual studies, Patrick Baker excavates what humanists thought was important about humanism, how they viewed their own history, what goals they enunciated, what triumphs they celebrated - in short, he attempts to reconstruct humanist identity. What emerges is a small, coherent community dedicated primarily not to political ideology, a philosophy of man, an educational ethos, or moral improvement, but rather to the pursuit of classical Latin eloquence. Grasping the significance this stylistic ideal had for the humanists is essential to understanding both their sense of themselves and the importance they and others attached to their movement. For eloquence was no mere aesthetic affair but rather appeared to them as the guarantor of civilisation itself.

Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror Reviews

'His book will serve as a useful reference. He writes with verve, makes perceptive observations, and, when he translates from the Latin, he does so competently.' John Monfasani, Renaissance Quarterly
'This book, which is elegantly written and impeccably presented, provides a useful corrective to modern assumptions about Renaissance humanism; it offers a contextualized analysis of hitherto little-studied texts, and gives a more balanced account of the humanistic movement It provides an interesting insight into the importance of studying humanistic writings produced in non-Florentine contexts, as well as in vernacular culture.' Maude Vanhaelen, Modern Language Review
'However, with his methodologically stringent approach, his familiarity with the huge literature on fifteenth-century Italian humanism, and his mastery of the Latin sources, Patrick Baker actually achieves what he set out to do, namely to offer us a new and stimulating answer to an old and vexing question: how to define the essence of Renaissance humanism? I recommend his book to all students of Italian Renaissance humanism.' Marianne Pade, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

About Patrick Baker (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin)

Patrick Baker (FAAR '13) received his PhD in History from Harvard University, Massachusetts in 2009 and is currently a Senior Research Associate at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. Primarily an intellectual historian of late medieval and early modern Italy, his scholarship has focused on Renaissance humanism, the transformative reception of the classical tradition, and historiography. He has won fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and Villa I Tatti. In 2014 he published an English translation of two monographic essays by the late Salvatore Camporeale (co-edited with Christopher S. Celenza), entitled Christianity, Latinity, and Culture: Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla, which includes an English version of Valla's Encomium of St Thomas Aquinas. He is a member of the Renaissance Society of America, the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, and the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands. He has organized several academic conferences, including 'Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance: The Humanist Depiction of Rulers in Historiographical and Biographical Texts' (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, November 2014) and 'Beyond Reception: Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Classical Antiquity' (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, March 2015).

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The renaissance of eloquence; 2. The scholastic studia humanitatis and the hagiography of humanism; 3. The triumph of Cicero; 4. Philology, printing, and the perfection of humanism; 5. Humanism in the mirror; Appendix: the pantheon of humanism; Bibliography; Index.

Additional information

NPB9781107111868
9781107111868
1107111862
Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror by Patrick Baker (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin)
New
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
2015-09-29
358
N/A
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