This is the first collection of Spinoza studies that deals exclusively with the language, style, and the transmission and editing of his texts. It includes investigations into the authorship of some minor texts, Spinoza's Latinity, the Hebrew passages in the Tractatus theologico-politicus, his way of handling quotations and his use of the first person singular. It contains a full concordance of the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, an inventory of the copies of Spinoza's Posthumous Works in the Netherlands and an account of the editions produced in the nineteenth century. In...

This study explores the relationship between the prevailing concept of "just profit" and contemporary reactions to the Sixteenth-Century Price Revolution by tracing the evolving meaning of "profit" in religious, political, and social discourse. Using the period's own macrocosmic-microcosmic analogy, the book examines family correspondence, wills, and court cases in addition to formal tracts to move outward from issues of spiritual profit to family values, employment relationships, and church and state. While England's experience provides a focal point, extensive use of continental sources...

This monograph is a study of the interaction of politics and political theory in The Netherlands and Asia in the early seventeenth century. Its focal point is the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who developed his rights and contract theories for the benefit of the United Dutch East India Company or VOC. The monograph reconstructs the immediate historical context of his political thought, as conceptualized in his early manuscript De Jure Praedae/On the Law of Prize and Booty and Mare Liberum/The Free Sea (1609). It argues that Grotius' justification of Dutch...

Authored by some of the most preeminent Renaissance scholars active today, the essays of this volume give fresh and illuminating analyses of important aspects of Renaissance humanism, such as the time and causes of its origin, its connection to the papal court and medieval traditions, its classical learning, its religious and literary dimensions, and its dramatis personae. Their interpretations are varied to the point of being contradictory. The essays bear the imprint of the work of the eminent scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, especially Kristeller's, and...

This book is a collection of eight essays on the ideology of Burgundy, dealing with the body of ideas, images, institutions and narrative fictions produced at the behest of the Valois dukes to create and maintain their incipient domanial state in the period from roughly 1364 to the 1560s. Nation building requires an ideological framework and the successive dukes, their officers and their court intellectuals all contributed to a self-determinative image of Burgundy which became visible in their literature, in their quest for a regal title, in the foundation of the Order of the Golden Fleece...

Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) is a key figure in the history of ideas, whose concepts have been seen as precursors to those developed by Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz and Kant. His Ethics presents a treatment of virtue from the standpoint of occasionalist metaphysics. The great Irish writer Samuel Beckett stated that Geulincx, with his emphasis on the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition, was a key influence on his works. This is the first complete version of the text to appear in a modern language. It includes the full text of the Ethics and Beckett's notes to his...

It is widely agreed that Protestant scholasticism influenced Kant's thinking on the question of Divine Providence. But the nature and extent of that influence have never been explored in detail. This is the scholarly lacuna the present volume seeks to fill. It shows how Kant, from his pre-Critical period onward, grappled with the concept of Divine Providence, sought to subjectivize and naturalize it, and how Protestant scholasticism played an important role, both positive and negative, in this endeavor. It also makes clear how this critical philosophical conversation gave rise to a powerful...

Claude de Seyssel's important political treatise, The Monarchy of France (1515) illuminates the link between warfare, the state, and the social order in the Renaissance. Raised and educated in Turin, Seyssel entered the service of the French king to facilitate the French invasion of Italy. His wide experience as a jurist, royal counselor, diplomat, propagandist, translator, historian, and prelate informed his unique political perspective. As a witness to the failures of the French in the Italian Wars, he maintained that successful conquest and occupation resulted from superior...

Drawing on the classical concept of rhetorical dispositio, this study gives new interpretations of a number of literary texts of the French Renaissance, some of them well-known (by Rabelais, Du Bellay and Montaigne), others less-known (the Pierres precieuses by Remy Belleau and the anonymous collections of emblematic fables). All these texts are organized according to an often problematic and disruptive dispositio that dissociates itself from the prescribed and preexisting models. This study not only seeks to approach the problem of literary ordering from a historical and...

This study presents the Tondo Doni to the new Florentine republic as a model of the 'great sacrament' of marriage from the New Testament book of Ephesians. Following fifteenth-century theology, Michelangelo portrayed Mary as a humble wife dominated and possessed by a virile guardian Joseph, the couple united as if 'two in one flesh'. To compensate for their symbolic propinquity, the painter cast her as a paragon of virginity, a muscular mulier fortis. In order to keep this virago in her place, Michelangelo coupled the Virgin in spiritual union with Christ, maenad-Psyche to bacchic...