The glory of the Italian Renaissance came not only from Europe's Latin heritage, but also from the rich legacy of another renaissance - the palaeologan of late Byzantium. This nexus of Byzantine and Latin cultural and ecclesiastical relations in the Renaissance and Medieval periods is the underlying theme of the diverse and far-ranging essays in Constantinople and the West.
As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works. These compositions included Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Most scholars have seen this vast literature as atypical of Renaissance humanism. Nancy Bisaha now offers an in-depth look at the body of Renaissance humanist works that focus not on classical or contemporary Italian subjects but on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, Bisaha probes these texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of self and other. Medieval concepts of Islam were generally informed and constrained by religious attitudes and rhetoric in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith. While humanist thinkers of the Renaissance did not move entirely beyond this stance, Creating East and West argues that their understanding was considerably more complex, in that it addressed secular and cultural issues, marking a watershed between the medieval and modern. Taking a close look at a number of texts, Bisaha expands current notions of Renaissance humanism and of the history of cross-cultural perceptions. Engaging both traditional methods of intellectual history and more recent methods of cross-cultural studies, she demonstrates that modern attitudes of Western societies toward other cultures emerged not during the later period of expansion and domination but rather as a defensive intellectual reaction to a sophisticated and threatening power to the East.
Language was the Italian humanists’ stock-in-trade, rhetoric their core discipline. In this volume Professor Monfasani collects together his most important articles on these subjects. One group of these, including two review essays, focuses specifically on the humanist Lorenzo Valla and on his philosophy of language. The third section of the book opens out the coverage of Italian Renaissance cultural history and includes studies of several new texts - among them a description of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, and a call for press censorship - and of the religious culture of mid-15th-century Rome. Le langage était l’instrumet de base des humanistes italiens, la rhétorique leur discipline de fond. Dans ce volume, le professeur Monfasani rassemble ses articles les plus importants sur le sujet . Un groupe d’entre eux, comprenant deux comptesrendus, se concentre spécifiquement sur l’humaniste Lorenzo Valla et sur sa philosophie du langage. La troisième section du recueil élargit le champ de connaissance de l’histoire culturelle de la Renaissance italienne et inclus des études de plusieurs textes nouveaus - parmi ceux-ci, une description de la décoration intérieure de la chapelle Sixtine et un appel à la censure de la presse -, ainsi que de la culture religieuse romaine au milieu du 15e siècle.
The question of Modern Greek identity is certainly timely. The political events of the previous years have once more brought up such questions as: What does it actually mean to be a Greek today? What is Modern Greece, apart from and beyond the bulk of information that one would find in an encyclopaedia and the established stereotypes? This volume delves into the timely nature of these questions and provides answers not by referring to often-cited classical Antiquity, nor by treating Greece as merely and exclusively a modern nation-state. Rather, it approaches the subject in a kaleidoscopic way, by tracing the line from the Byzantine Empire to Modern Greek culture, society, philosophy, literature and politics. In presenting the diverse and certainly non-dominant approaches of a multitude of Greek scholars, it provides new insights into a diachronic problem, and will encourage new arguments and counterarguments. Despite commonly held views among Greek intelligentsia or the worldwide community, Modern Greek identity remains an open question – and wound.
Possible Lives uses the saints'lives written by humanists of the Italian Renaissance to explore the intertwining of classical and religious cultures on the eve of the European Reformation. The lives of saints were among the most reproduced and widely distributed literatures of medieval and early modern Europe. During the century before the Reformation, these narratives of impossible goodness fell into the hands of classicizing intellectuals known as humanists. This study examines how the humanist authors received, criticized, and rewrote the traditional stories of exemplary virtue for patrons and audiences who were surprisingly open to their textual experiments. Drawn from a newly constructed catalog of primary sources in manuscript and print, the cases in this book range from the lure of martyrdom as the West confronted Islam to the use of saints'lives in local politics and the rhetorician's classroom. Frazier discusses the writers'perceptions of historical sanctity, the commanding place of the mendicant friars, and one unique account of a contemporary holy woman. Possible Lives shows that the classical Renaissance was also a saintly Renaissance, as humanists deployed their rhetorical and philological skills to "renew the persuasive force of Christian virtue" and "save the cult of the saints." Combining quantitative and anecdotal approaches in a highly readable series of case studies, Frazier reveals the contextual richness of this little-known and unexpectedly large body of Latin hagiography.
In the Middle Ages, as Christian sources on the Islamic world show, Muslim culture was perceived as extremely threatening: there were many defenses of Christianity, like the treatise on the "mistakes" of the followers of Allah. This book shows, through an analysis of the works of Nicholas of Cusa and of other authors, that in the course of time this textual attitude was modified, as European authors aimed to point out the Christian truth in comparison with the "falsity" of Islamic theology, in order to reinforce Christian identity through the presupposition of its own absolute truth. The apologetic aim was gradually replaced by a systematic comparison based on partial translations of the Qur'an. The comparison with the "other" was also the basis for reinforcing identity, in order to demonstrate the truth and consequently the supremacy of one's own theoretical position.
This book focuses on the reception of classical political ideas in the political thought of the fourteenth-century Italian writer Marsilius of Padua. Vasileios Syros provides a novel cross-cultural perspective on Marsilius’s theory and breaks fresh ground by exploring linkages between his ideas and the medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Byzantine traditions. Syros investigates Marsilius’s application of medical metaphors in his discussion of the causes of civil strife and the desirable political organization. He also demonstrates how Marsilius’s demarcation between ethics and politics and his use of examples from Greek mythology foreshadow early modern political debates (involving such prominent political authors as Niccolò Machiavelli and Paolo Sarpi) about the political dimension of religion, church-state relations, and the emergence and decline of the state.
