The Italian Dominican friar Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio (1456-1527), known as Prierias, is chiefly remembered as the church official designated to respond to Luther's 95 theses of December 1517--a response blamed for fanning the flames of the Reformation throughout Europe. In "Prierias," Michael Tavuzzi presents the first full biography of this little-known, yet eminent, sixteenth-century ecclesiastic, as well as an account of his wide-ranging literary works.
Tavuzzi shows that, aside from being Luther's first opponent, Prierias played a key role in significant early-sixteenth-century...

The Renaissance movement known as humanism eventually spread from Italy through all of western Europe, transforming early modern culture in ways that are still being felt and debated. Central to these debates--and to this book--is the question of whether (and how) the humanist movement contributed to the secularization of Western cultural traditions at the end of the Middle Ages. A preeminent scholar of Italian humanism, Riccardo Fubini approaches this question in a new way--by redefining the problem of secularization more carefully to show how humanists can at once be secularizers and...