Humanism

PRIMARY SOURCES

Astell, Mary. The First English Feminist: Reflections on Marriage and Other Writings. Edited by Bridget Hill. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. Famous Women. Edited and translated by Virginia Brown. The I Tatti Renaissance Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Henderson, Katherine Usher, and Barbara F. McManus. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., eds. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. 2nd ed. Asheville, N.C.: Pegagus Press, 1997. Separate volumes devoted to the writings of three of the writers included in this volume have appeared in "The Other Voice" series (below): Laura Cereta, Cassandra Fedele, and Isotta Nogarola.

"The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe," a project in the textual recovery of continental European women's writings, c. 1400–1700, edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr. and published by the University of Chicago Press. Sixty-eight volumes have been approved for publication, and as of the end of 2003, twenty-five had been published, translated from French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. Published texts include those by Moderata Fonte, Marie le Jars de Gournay, Lucrezia Marinella, Isotta Nogarola, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Arcangela Tarabotti, some of whom are mentioned in the body of this essay.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. in one. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.

——. In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. See, in conjunction with both entries, James Hankins, "The 'Baron Thesis' after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni," Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 309–339; and AHR Forum on the Baron thesis, with commentary by Ronald Witt, John Najemy, Craig Kallendorf, and Werner Gundersheimer, The American Historical Review 101 (1996): 107–144. See further, Mark Jurdjevic, "Civic Humanism and the Rise of the Medici," Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 994–1020, which argues convincingly why and how civic humanists could support the Medici regime in Florence after 1434.

Eden, Kathy. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

Garin, Eugenio. Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance. Translated by Peter Munz. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. His thesis concerning the conjunction of these three elements (humanism, philosophy, civic life).

Kekewich, Lucille, ed. The Renaissance in Europe: A Cultural Enquiry. Vol. 1: The Impact of Humanism. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2000. There are two additional volumes on other aspects of Renaissance culture art and politics), plus two volumes accompanying the entire series, one of ancillary secondary readings and the other of primary sources. The best of contemporary scholarship distilled for teaching.

King, Margaret L. Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

——. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Kraye, Jill, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kristeller, Paul O. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961.

——. Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. These two short books are the best statements of Kristeller's thesis regarding humanism, its difference from other movements in Renaissance Italy, and its diffusion.

Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. The best of the recent book-length treatments of humanism designed for students and general readers.

Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed. Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy. 3 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Paperback edition with corrections 1992. The most comprehensive contemporary treatment of the subject in one source.

Rummel, Erika. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Trinkaus, Charles. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Demonstrates in great detail the religious and theological interests of Italian humanists.

Witt, Ronald G. In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Boston: Brill, 2000. The emergence of humanism from the 1240s until just after 1400 in Italy; the second volume in a two-volume study of the historical background of humanism. The first volume (forth-coming) will cover developments in the earlier Middle Ages up to the 1240s (outlined in Rabil, ed., above, 1.29–70). Witt's thesis refines but does not alter Kristeller's paradigm.