In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought

Description

Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance is widely considered one of the most important works in Italian Renaissance studies. Princeton University Press published this seminal book in 1955. Now the Press makes available a two-volume collection of eighteen of Professor Baron's essays, most of them thoroughly revised, unpublished, or presented in English for the first time. Spanning the larger part of his career, they provide a continuation of, and complement to, the earlier book. The essays demonstrate that, contemporaneously with the revolution in art, modern humanistic thought developed in the city-state climate of early Renaissance Florence to a far greater extent than has generally been assumed. The publication of these volumes is a major scholarly event: a reinforcement and amplification of the author's conception of civic Humanism. The book includes studies of medieval antecedents and special studies of Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Leon Battista Alberti. It offers a thoroughly re-conceived profile of Machiavelli, drawn against the background of civic Humanism, as well as essays presenting evidence that French and English Humanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely tied to Italian civic thought of the fifteenth. The work culminates in a reassessment of Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering thought on the Renaissance. Originally published in 1988. II. THE HISTORICAL SETTING AND INFLUENCE OF FLORENTINE HUMANISM Eleven. Fifteenth-Century Civilization North of the Alps and the Italian Quattrocento: Contrast and Confluence 1 Twelve. A Sociological Interpretation of the Early Florentine Renaissance 40 Thirteen. The Humanistic Revaluation of the Vita Activa in Italy and North of the Alps 55 Fourteen. The Querelle of the Ancients and the Modems as a Problem for Present Renaissance Scholarship 72 Fifteen. Machiavelli the Republican Citizen and Author of The Prince 101 III. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMMENTARIES Sixteen. The Limits of the Notion of "Renaissance Individualism": Burckhardt After a Century (1960) 155 Seventeen. The Course of My Studies in Florentine Humanism (1965) 82 Eighteen. A Defense of the View of the Quattrocento First Offered in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1970) 194 Index of Names