Under the enlightened rule of the Buyid dynasty (945-1055 A.D.) the Islamic world witnessed an unequalled cultural renaissance. This book is an investigation into the nature of the environment in which the cultural transformation took place and into the cultural elite who were its bearers. After an extensive introductory section setting the stage, the book deals with the main schools and circles and with the outstanding individual representatives of this renaissance. The main expression of this renaissance was a philosophical humanism that embraced the scientific and philosophical heritage of Classical Antiquity as a cultural and educational ideal. Along with this philosophical humanism, a literary humanism was cultivated by litterateurs, poets, and government secretaries. This renaissance was marked by a powerful assertion of individualism in the domains of literary creativity and political action. It thrived in a remarkably cosmopolitan atmosphere - Baghdad, the center of the 'Abb?sid empire and of Buyid rule.

Under the enlightened rule of the Buyid dynasty (945-1055 A.D.) the Islamic world witnessed an unequalled cultural renaissance. This book is an investigation into the nature of the environment in which the cultural transformation took place and into the cultural elite who were its bearers. After an extensive introductory section setting the stage, the book deals with the main schools and circles and with the outstanding individual representatives of this renaissance. The main expression of this renaissance was a philosophical humanism that embraced the scientific and philosophical heritage of Classical Antiquity as a cultural and educational ideal. Along with this philosophical humanism, a literary humanism was cultivated by litterateurs, poets, and government secretaries. This renaissance was marked by a powerful assertion of individualism in the domains of literary creativity and political action. It thrived in a remarkably cosmopolitan atmosphere — Baghdad, the center of the ‘Abbāsid empire and of Buyid rule.

Challenging beliefs about intellectual culture, Makdisi reaffirms the links between Western and Arabic thought and shows that although scholasticism and humanism have long been considered to be exclusive to the Western world, they have their roots in the medieval Islamic world.

Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from—and contributed to—contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean. This groundbreaking book offers new insights into Renaissance humanist scholarship and long-standing European debates over the relationship between Christianity and Islam.

This book is an attempt to explain how, in the face of increasing religious authoritarianism in medieval Islamic civilization, some Muslim thinkers continued to pursue essentially humanistic, rational, and scientific discourses in the quest for knowledge, meaning, and values. Drawing on a wide range of Islamic writings, from love poetry to history to philosophical theology, Goodman shows that medieval Islam was open to individualism, occasional secularism, skepticism, even liberalism.

This new textbook provides students with a highly readable synthesis of the major determining features of the European Renaissance, one of the most influential cultural revolutions in history. Professor Nauert's approach is broader than the traditional focus on Italy, and tackles the themes in the wider European context. He traces the origins of the humanist 'movement' and connects it to the social and political environments in which it developed. In a tour-de-force of lucid exposition over six wide-ranging chapters, Nauert charts the key intellectual, social, educational and philosophical concerns of this humanist revolution, using art and biographical sketches of key figures to illuminate the discussion. The study also traces subsequent transformations of humanism and its solvent effect on intellectual developments in the late Renaissance.

While humanist sensibilities have played a formative role in the advancement of our species, critical attention to humanism as a field of study is a more recent development. As a system of thought that values human needs and experiences over supernatural concerns, humanism has gained greater attention amid the rapidly shifting demographics of religious communities, especially in Europe and North America. This outlook on the world has taken on global dimensions as well, with activists, artists, and thinkers forming a humanistic response not only to traditional religion, but to the pressing social and political issues of the 21st century. With in-depth, scholarly chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Humanism aims to cover the subject by analyzing its history, its philosophical development, its influence on culture, and its engagement with social and political issues. In order to expand the field beyond more Western-focused works, the Handook discusses humanism as a worldwide phenomenon, with regional surveys that explore how the concept has developed in particular contexts. The Handbook also approaches humanism as both an opponent to traditional religion as well as a philosophy that some religions have explicitly adopted. By both synthesizing the field, and discussing how it continues to grow and develop, the Handbook promises to be a landmark volume, relevant to both humanism and the rapidly changing religious landscape.

Students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance easily fall under the spell of its achievements: its self-confident humanism, its groundbreaking scientific innovations, its ravishing artistic production. Yet many of the developments in Italian ceramics and glass were made possible by Italy's proximity to the Islamic world. The Arts of Fire underscores how central the Islamic influence was on this luxury art of the Italian Renaissance. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum on view from May 4 to August 5, 2004, The Arts of Fire demonstrates how many of the techniques of glass and ceramic production and ornamentation were first developed in the Islamic East between the eighth and twelfth centuries. These techniques - enamel and gilding on glass and tin-glaze and lustre on ceramics - produced brilliant and colourful decoration that was a source of awe and admiration, transforming these crafts, for the first time, into works of art and true luxury commodities. Essays by Catherine Hess, George Saliba, and Linda Komaroff demonstrate early modern Europe's debts to the Islamic world and help us better understand the interrelationships of cultures over time.

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.

The Renaissance marked a turning point in Europe’s relationship to Arabic thought. On the one hand, Dag Nikolaus Hasse argues, it was the period in which important Arabic traditions reached the peak of their influence in Europe. On the other hand, it is the time when the West began to forget, and even actively suppress, its debt to Arabic culture. Success and Suppression traces the complex story of Arabic influence on Renaissance thought. It is often assumed that the Renaissance had little interest in Arabic sciences and philosophy, because humanist polemics from the period attacked Arabic learning and championed Greek civilization. Yet Hasse shows that Renaissance denials of Arabic influence emerged not because scholars of the time rejected that intellectual tradition altogether but because a small group of anti-Arab hard-liners strove to suppress its powerful and persuasive influence. The period witnessed a boom in new translations and multivolume editions of Arabic authors, and European philosophers and scientists incorporated—and often celebrated—Arabic thought in their work, especially in medicine, philosophy, and astrology. But the famous Arabic authorities were a prominent obstacle to the Renaissance project of renewing European academic culture through Greece and Rome, and radical reformers accused Arabic science of linguistic corruption, plagiarism, or irreligion. Hasse shows how a mixture of ideological and scientific motives led to the decline of some Arabic traditions in important areas of European culture, while others continued to flourish.