Against the background of religious wars and in full knowledge of the relevance of the new exact sciences of the the seventeenth-century, Spinoza developed one of the most ambitious projects in the history of philosophy: his Ethics written in geometrical style. It is a book that deals with ontology, epistemology, human emotions, as well as with freedom and bondage of individuals and societies, in one continuous line of argument. At the same time, the book combines the highest standards of conceptual and argumentative clarity with a wisdom that is saturated with the experience of life....

Augustine articulates temporality as focus rather than duration. It encompasses the shift from the future through the present to the past. Yet this a-causal, free-floating concept of time has never been applied to the shape of Augustine's own narrative in the Confessions, or to that other vintage Augustinian problem: predestination. This book examines Augustinian temporality by experimentally projecting it onto modern(ist) authors (Kleist, Henry James, Kafka, Beckett) who are less dependent on sequential narrative and more concerned with the fragility and sustainability of voice in...

The last of the Renaissance humanists, Bonaventura Vulcanius, is still a mysterious figure, even though he left a correspondence, at least two Alba amicorum, and a collection of books and manuscripts. Born in Bruges in 1538, the son of a disciple of Erasmus, he spent the troubled decades of 1560 and 1570 in wanderings before his appointment in 1581 as a Professor for Greek and Latin Letters at the University of Leiden. He edited and translated many a rare text, composed dictionaries, sent laudatory poems, and compiled the first chapters of a history of Germanic languages. This volume gathers...

The message of the old testamentary Maccabees is martial and pernicious as well as already pointed out by Erasmus of Rotterdam. The circumstances in which the Maccabeean literature emerged are complex and have not yet been explored by scholars in all their details; even more complex is the history of its influence, the Wirkungsgeschichte in the sense Hans-Georg Gadamer has given to the term, a history which was to large extent a purely Christian one. The early Christians saw the Maccabees as prototypical martyrs. Later they discovered warrior heroes whose courage was the measure of whoever...

Die Autorin fuhrt uns in das Milieu des Berliner Refuge Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts, in dem der junge Barbeyrac lebte und des Socinianismus angeklagt wurde. Sie zeigt, mit welcher Heftigkeit theologische Fragen diskutiert wurden, besonders Bibel-Ubersetzungen, wie die von Leclerc oder Lenfant. Das Buch berichtigt unsere einseitigen Vorstellungen vom Werdegang eines der Helden der Fruhaufklarung, indem es seine Gegner vorstellt, die keines- wegs Dunkelmanner waren, sondern Gelehrte von Format, die den Diskussionsstand der Zeit in Theologie und Philosophie souveran uberblickten. Diese...

This collection of essays honours Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) as a Platonic philosopher. Ficino was not the first translator of Plato in the Renaissance, but he was the first to translate the entire corpus of Platonic works, and to emphasise their relevance for contemporary readers. The present work is divided into two sections: the first explores aspects of Ficino's own thought and the sources which he used. The second section follows aspects of his influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The papers presented here deepen and enrich our understanding of Ficino, and of the...

The Eighty Years' War and the establishment of two states in the Low Countries inaugurated the publication of numerous texts to support a distinct Northern and Southern identity. This study analyses urban and regional chorographies written both in the North and in the South in the seventeenth century. It examines different strategies that chorographers developed to make sense of the recent and more remote past. It also looks at the development of different historiographical traditions in the Protestant North and the Catholic South and thus contributes to the current research interest in the...

Drawing on new manuscript sources, this volume offers seven contributions on Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the most significant biblical critic in eighteenth-century Germany, as well as an eminent Enlightenment philosopher, a renowned classicist, and expert on Judaism.

Despite its non-Christian origins, the scheme of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) found wide acceptance in medieval theology, philosophy, and religious literature. The present study is the first to investigate the history of the four virtues in the Latin Middle Ages from patristic times to the late fourteenth century. It examines the position of the cardinal virtues between religious and secularized conceptions of morality and attempts to reveal some distinctly Christian aspects of medieval virtue theory notwithstanding its manifest indebtedness to ancient...

This book challenges concepts of an ahistorically powerful England and shows both that the intermingling of Islamic and English Protestant identity was a recurring theme of the eighteenth century, and that this cultural mixing was a topic of debate and anxiety in the English cultural imagination. It charts the way representation of England and the Ottomans changed as England grew into an imperial power. By focusing on texts dealing with the Ottomans, the author argues that we can observe the turning point in public perceptions, the moments when English subjects began to believe British...