There is a tendency in modern scholarship to describe the Renaissance Humanists merely as readers as interpreters happily absorbed within the bounds of their chosen classical texts. In "Theory as Practice," Nancy Struever contests this accepted notion; by focusing on ethical inquiry, she presents the Humanists as engaged in subtle, innovative moral work.
Struever argues that the accomplishment of five major Renaissance figures Petrarch, Nicolaus Cusanus, Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Montaigne was to consider theory as practice and thus engage the ethics of inquiry. She notes three...