The papers in this volume offer examples of how historians, writers, playwrights, and painters in the early modern period used ancient history as a rich field of raw material that could be used, recycled, and adapted to new needs and purposes. They focused on classical antiquity as a source from which they could recreate the past as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. The contributors to this volume have addressed a number of important, common issues that span a wide range of subjects from fifteenth-century Italian painting to the teaching of Greek history in...

Early Modern letter-writing was often the only way to maintain regular and meaningful contact. Scholars, politicians, printers, and artists wrote to share private or professional news, to test new ideas, to support their friends, or pursue personal interests. Epistolary exchanges thus provide a private lens onto major political, religious, and scholarly events. Sixteenth century's reform movements created a sense of disorder, if not outright clashes and civil war. Scholars could not shy away from these tensions. The private sphere of letter-writing allowed them to express, or allude to, the...