It is well known that medieval Europe owes most of its scientific learning to the translations of Arabic treatises made in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The earliest Arabic infiltrations in Latin science are however much older. They can be traced back to the tenth century and to the making, in Catalonia, of a large corpus of astrological treatises: the Alchandreana. Based mainly on Arabic sources, but also on Hebrew and Latin sources, the Alchandreana constitute an exceptional testimony of cross-cultural exchanges between Christian, Arabic and Jewish scholars before the...

The monastic erudition of the old religious orders was a pillar of the Catholic Enlightenment within the Holy Roman Empire and many other European countries. Despite the enormous importance the monks had as champions of programmatic Enlightenment ideas, few of their original texts are available in modern editions. The present edition contributes to filling this lacuna by making available the main work of the Benedictine monk, Beda Mayr (1742-1794), who developed a modern and ecumenical Catholic theology. Diese Edition macht das Werk "Vertheidigung der katholischen Religion" (1789) des...

James of Viterbo's De regimine Christiano was produced at the height of the great conflict of 1296-1303 between Pope Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair of France. Echoing and elaborating Boniface's Bull Unam sanctam, the treatise is a detailed and rigorous defence of the 'hierocratic' ideology of the thirteenth-century papacy in its most ambitious form. As such, it stands alongside the better-known De ecclesiastica potestate of Giles of Rome, by which it is to some extent influenced. De regimine Christiano is here presented in a new and complete critical edition,...

The poetry of John Stewart of Baldynneis, one of James VI's soi disant Castalian Band, is a relatively unknown phenomenon of the Renaissance period. This book is a critical edition of his epic poem Roland Furious, supposedly a translation of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso into Scots but actually a brilliantly original poem which directly follows guidelines given by James VI for the creation of such literature in the Scottish vernacular. A fully annotated version of the text is given, along with a critical induction discussing the main European influences on Stewart's...

In 1492, Angelo Poliziano published his Lamia, a praelectio, or opening oration to a course he would teach that academic year on Aristotle's Prior Analytics at the Florentine university. Having heard murmurings that he was not philosopher enough to teach the Aristotelian text, Poliziano strikes back, offering in effect a fable-tinted history of philosophy. More than a repudiation of local gossip, the text represents a rethinking of the mission of philosophy. This volume offers the first English translation, an edition of the Latin text, and four studies that set this rich example of humanist...

Socio-cultural criticism is the continuous assessment and evaluation of developments within democratic society and hence a vital ingredient of democracy itself. Departing from the French Revolution, this study focuses upon a tradition of European criticism. On the whole, critics accepted that technological advance was irreversible but they opposed the assumption that this implied general progress. Instead, they stressed the negatives: class conflict, erosion of tradition, mechanization of life, fragmentation of society, loss of cultural differentiation. The approach is exclusively...

In 1503, Nifo published De intellectu, the major work of his early career, touching on questions of philosophical psychology. Based on a detailed assessment of the views of his predecessors, Nifo in this work presented an analysis of the main issues of Peripatetic noetics, namely origin and immortality of the intellect or rational soul, its relation to the body, its unity and parts, the speculative intellect, and intellectual beatitude. Here the 1554 edition is reproduced. The Introduction is followed by an extensive analytical summary of the contents of the work. The Appendix contains...

Thema von Lipsius' Saturnaliengesprache (1582) sind die Gladiatorenspiele. Alle Aspekte werden beleuchtet, zum Beispiel, welche Arten Gladiatoren es gab: da waren Kriminelle, aber auch hohe Beamte dabei, die - manchmal freiwillig - als Gladiatoren funktionierten. Die detaillierte Beschreibung schliet gut an bei seinen anderen historiographischen Werken, wie De Amphitheatro (1584). Am Ende der Saturnaliengesprache steht eine schwungvolle Rede uber die bewundernswerten Bestandigkeit der Gladiatoren. Lipsius spricht in verschiedenen Briefen uber sie als leuchtende Vorbilder....

Brill authors Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro discovered the original manuscript of Spinoza's "Ethica" in the Vatican library. This spectacular discovery attracted a lot of media attention. NRC Handelsblad, 26th May 2011 Radio 1 News, 27th May 2011 NOS News, 27th May 2011 The Vatican codex, which contains the complete text of Spinoza's Ethics, is the only surviving manuscript of this work and constitutes a document of great importance. On 23 September 1677, it was handed over to the Roman Holy Office by Spinoza's former friend Niels Stensen who had converted to...

Ever since it was first written, Adriaan Koerbagh's anti-Christian work, A Light Shining in Dark Places, has been nearly inaccessible. Had it been known during the Enlightenment, it would have been a great inspiration to radical thinkers. However, it was suppressed and the author died in jail. The full text is now available in English. Koerbagh demolishes such Christian notions as the Creator, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, heaven and hell, angels, devils and miracles. Instead, he presents a monistic world view in which Nature and God are identical. Theology is a part of natural...