Although little known today, the Utrecht physician and town councillor Lambert van Velthuysen (1622-1685) was a prolific Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher and a vociferous advocate of the new philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes. The Letter on the Principles of Justness and Decency of 1651 constitutes both the first published reaction to Hobbes's political philosophy and the first attempt by a Dutch philosopher at using Hobbes to supply a 'Cartesian' moral philosophy. It is also a highly original work that seeks to define the nature of virtue and vice and to justify the...

The Hieroglyphenkunde by Karl Giehlow published in 1915, described variously by critics as "a masterpiece", "magnificent", "monumental" and "incomparable", is here translated into English for the first time. Giehlow's work with an initial focus on the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, the manuscript of which was discovered by Giehlow, was a pioneering attempt to introduce the thesis that Egyptian hieroglyphics had a fundamental influence on the Italian literature of allegory and symbolism and beyond that on the evolution of all Renaissance art. The present edition includes the illustrations of...

De Amphitheatro ist ein Dialog, den Lipsius und sein Lehrer Florentius fuhren, wahrend sie durch Rom spazieren. Sie besprechen allerlei Aspekte der Amphitheater, wie zum Beispiel die Gotter, denen die Amphitheater gewidmet sind und die Menschen, die sie bauen lieen. Aber der grote Teil dieses Buches befasst sich mit dem Colosseum und seinen vielfaltigen Nutzungsmoglichkeiten und so weiter. De Amphitheatris quae extra Romam libellus, der zweite Teil, ist eine Beschreibung von Amphitheatern auerhalb von Rom, wie in Verona, Pola und Nimes. Wo immer es geht, lasst Lipsius seine...

Giacomo Zabarella (1533-1589) was a Renaissance Aristotelian who enjoyed extraordinary prestige in life, especially in the fields of logic and natural philosophy. The De rebus naturalibus libri XXX was completed by Zabarella at the very end of his life: the dedicatory letter to Pope Sixtus V is dated just a month before his death. This writing had great impact and a large influence, as its editorial success in Italy and abroad (especially in Germany) reflects. It represents a massive effort to collect all the issues that come under the heading of "natural philosophy" and that had been...

Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius is the first English translation of Pierre Bayle's last book, Entretiens de Maxime et de Themiste, published posthumously in 1707. The two parts of the Dialogues offer Bayle's final responses to Jean Le Clerc and Isaac Jaquelot, who had accused Bayle of supporting atheism through his writings on the problem of evil. The Dialogues defends Bayle's thesis that the problem of evil cannot be solved by reason alone, but serves only to demonstrate the necessity of faith. In his Introduction to the Dialogues, Michael W. Hickson...

In Giannozzo Manetti's New Testament Annet den Haan analyses the Latin translation of the Greek New Testament made by the fifteenth-century humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459). The book includes the first edition of Manetti's text. Manetti's translation was the first since Jerome's Vulgate, and it predates Erasmus' Novum Instrumentum by half a century. Written at the Vatican court in the 1450s, it is a unique example of humanist philology applied to the sacred text in the pre-Reformation era. Den Haan argues that Manetti's translation was influenced by Valla's...

Winner of the 2018 Josef IJsewijn Prize for Best Book on a Neo-Latin Topic Although many humanists, from Petrarch to Fulvio Orsini, had written briefly about library history, the De bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius was the first self-contained monograph on the topic. The De bibliothecis proved to be a seminal achievement, both in redefining the scope of library history and in articulating a vision of a public, secular, research institution for the humanities. It was repeatedly reprinted and translated, plagiarized and epitomized. Through the end of the nineteenth century, scholars turned to it...

Exploration, trade and conquest expanded and upset traditional worldviews of early modern Europeans. Christians saw themselves confronted with a largely heathen world. In the wake of Iberian colonization, Jesuits successfully christianized heathen populations overseas. In his De conversione Indorum et gentilium, Johannes Hoornbeeck presents a systematic overview of every aspect of the missionary imperative from a Reformed Protestant perspective. The most attractive part of his book may be the global survey it offers of the various types of heathens, an early example of comparative religion....

In Crocologia – A Detailed Study of Saffron, the King of Plants, Sally Francis and Maria Teresa Ramandi present the first translation into English of Johann Ferdinand Hertodt’s seminal 1671 work Crocologia, a book uniquely devoted to the medical uses of saffron. Hertodt discusses saffron’s origin, related species, cultivation, selection, properties and lists all its pharmaceutical preparations. Hertodt then journeys through diseases of the human body, presenting saffron-containing formulae for their treatment. The two authors complement the translation with a biography of Hertodt,...

In this 3-volume set of primary sources, Lionel Laborie and Ariel Hessayon bring together a wide range of vital sources for the study of prophecy in the early modern world. This meticulously edited collection includes rare material and fascinating manuscripts published in English for the first time. Volumes are organised geographically, each with its own introduction by a specialist. Together with their respective contributors, they show how prophecies circulated widely throughout this period at all levels of society. Indeed, they often emerged in times of crisis and were delivered as...