'The humanist idea of education is among the permanently influential legacies of the Italian Renaissance. Four short Latin treatises published between 1400 and 1460 define it admirably: Pier Paolo Vergerio's De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adolescentiae studiis; Leonardo Bruni's De studiis et literis; the De liberorum educatione of Aeneas Sylvius, who later became Pope Pius II; and Battista Guarino's De ordine docendi et studendi. Translated into English by William Harrison Woodward and framed, on the one hand, by his description of the famous school founded by Vittorino da Feltre in...

Giordano Bruno was an itinerant Italian friar who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresies, that included his rejection of the Ptolemaic cosmology. Like Galileo, who met a similar fate for similar reasons later in the century, Bruno has been accorded martyrdom to the cause of scientific truth and regarded as a visionary whose ideas were out of joint with the superstitions of his time. In fact, as editors Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner point out, Bruno was far more complex, and his thought far more intricate, than simple stereotype would suggest.

Possibly mad, certainly...

When attempting to globally divide ideas into orthodox and subversive categories, it is not always clear what precisely is subversive to the dominant ideology and vice versa. Going against recent trends in English Renaissance studies, Deborah Shuger examines orthodox, rather than subversive, methods of thought in the English Renaissance. Instead of finding a monolithic, unified body of thought, she reveals a remarkably non-uniform 'orthodox' ideology containing a wide range of views. Shuger's approach also re-examines and re-legitimizes the investigation of the connections between religion...

First published in 1971 by Harper & Row, The Society of Renaissance Florence is an invaluable collection of 132 original Florentine documents dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and covering a wide range of subjects from taxes to social mobility, to family, death, and civic life, to violence, crime, and morality. Also included are seldom seen documents addressing the state of the poor and such groups as Jews, heretics, sorcerers, and homosexuals.

'I have made a conscious effort to select material which reveals something about the emotions, passions, and...

'I wish we were able to eliminate poverty completely in this city' Those words written by Juan Luis Vives, a Spanish humanist living in Bruges in 1526, could have been written in the late twentieth century. The urban problems of sixteenth-century Bruges are very familiar to the modern reader: poverty, overcrowding, crime, the problems of the mentally ill, and the issue of the responsibility of government for the care of the poor. Published in 1526, On Assistance to the Poor was Vives' effort to bring these questions to the attention of the City Council of Bruges, and have them addressed by...

Ludovico Dolce's Dialogo della pittura first appeared in Venice in 1557. L'Aretino, by which the work is known today, consists of a three-part dialogue between two Venetians, Aretino and Fabrini, on the particular merits of works of art and artists, including Michaelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello. It is based largely on Aretino's letters.

The edition is presented in the original Italian with English facing-page translation.

This study of early art criticism serves to reveal something of how aesthetics were judged based on classical sources (especially Aristotle) and...

During the Renaissance, there were two centres of art, culture and mercantile power in Italy: Florence, and Venice. This is a sourcebook of primary materials, almost none previously available in English, for the history of the city-state of Venice. The time period covers the apogee of Venetian power and reputation to the beginnings of its decline in the 1630s. Sources used include diaries, chronicles, Inquisitorial records, literature, legislation, and contemporary descriptions, and are organized in sections by theme and accompanied by brief introductions.

In 1492, the Jews of Spain were given a choice: convert to Christianity or be expelled from Spain. Many chose to hide themselves as 'New Christians, ' or conversos, outwardly professing to be Christians while practicing their true faith in secret. In 1504, the Office of the Inquisition was set up in the remote Spanish holdings on the Canary Islands to seek out crypto-Jews, sorcerers, and other heretics. Jews in the Canary Islands is a calendar of Jewish cases brought before the Canariote Inquisition between 1499 and 1818, when the Inquisition was discontinued.

First published in...

Lauro Martines' exhaustive search of manuscript material in the state archives of Florence is the basis for a fascinating portrayal of representative humanists of the period. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists explores the wealth, family tradition, civic prominence, and intellectual achievements of these individuals while assessing the attitudes of other Florentines towards them. Martines demonstrates that humanists tended to be wealthy educated men from important families, challenging long-held assumptions about the status of humanisits in that society.

First...