Augustine and the Humanists
Reading the City of God from Petrarch to Poliziano
- Edited by: Guy Claessens, Fabio Della Schiava,
Print edition: € 75.00
Abstract
Augustine and the Humanists investigates the reception of Augustine’s De civitate Dei in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
In response to the urgent call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, De civitate Dei, has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the City of God at the dawn of the modern age. Augustine and the Humanists focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.
Quanto ai curatori e agli autori dei singoli contributi, essi non solo hanno accettato la sfida posta decenni fa da Kristeller, ma possono orgogliosamente rivendicare il merito di aver dato una prima risposta all’interrogativo che il grande studioso dell’Umanesimo aveva posto. Chiudono il volume, splendidamente stampato dalla neonata Lysa Publishers e corredato da 21 immagini di altissima qualità, un indice dei manoscritti e dei nomi. – Giancarlo Abbamonte, Bollettino di Studi Latini.
The book itself is well presented and highly readable, likely to be of value to scholars of Augustine, the (Italian) Renaissance, and the humanists in question. The secondary scholarship cited throughout is
up-to-the-minute. – Patrick Ball, Parergon.
