Few eras took education so seriously or were so innovative in their approaches to schools and universities as the Renaissance. At the same time, religious and political concerns strongly influenced educational developments. This third volume of articles by Paul F. Grendler explores the close connections between education, religion, and politics at several levels and in different contexts. It combines detailed research into various kinds of schools with broad overviews of European and especially Italian education. The lead article compares Italian and German universities and assesses the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the latter. Even Erasmus, the great critic of university theologians, felt the need to acquire a doctorate in theology and did so. In Italy, the new schools of the Jesuits and the Piarists taught boys and young men gratis, but not without opposition. Two articles deal with students, the consumers of education. While teachers and students were most directly involved in schools and universities, ecclesiastical and political authorities, including the leaders of the Republic of Venice, the subject of the final study, kept a watchful eye on them.

This third volume of articles by Paul F. Grendler explores the connections between education, religion, and politics. It combines detailed research, such as on Erasmus's doctorate and the new schools of the Jesuits and Piarists, with broad overviews of European and especially Italian education. Two of the studies appear here for the first time in English.

The Fifth Lateran Council (1512-17), whose 500th anniversary is being commemorated, has left a legacy little studied by scholars. The council’s status as an ecumenical council was questioned by its opponents and its decrees ignored, resisted, or only slowly implemented. This new collection of articles by Nelson H. Minnich examines: what is an ecumenical council, the reasons Lateran V qualifies as such, the roles the popes played in it, the council as a theater for demonstrating papal power, what was proposed as its agenda, what decrees were issued, and to what extent they were implemented. The decrees that receive special attention are those: affirming the legitimacy of the credit organizations known as montes pietatis that charged management fees, imposing prepublication censorship on printed works, abrogating the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), reining in the privileges of mendicant friars, and closing the council while imposing a crusade tithe. These decrees were gradually implemented and Carlo Borromeo incorporated some of the Lateran reform decrees into his conciliar legislation that was taken up by other bishops. Lateran V did leave a lasting legacy and Leo X considered the council one of his great achievements. The volume includes four studies not previously published in English. (CS1060).

This volume offers a scholarly examination of educational history, highlighting the pivotal role of educational practices from the late medieval era to the early modern period. It provides a dynamic forum for emerging academics in the field, revealing fresh, multifaceted perspectives on the educational methods of this era. The work illuminates the sophisticated educational systems that shaped Renaissance Milan's merchants and the education of cantors in royal courts and cathedrals. Spanning from Brazil to India, it traces the extensive reach of Jesuit influence and reveals how their teachings fostered an early consciousness of a globally interconnected world in European education. Contributors include Bradley Blankemeyer, Laura Madella, Jessica Ottelli, Federico Piseri, David Salomoni, and Carolina Vaz de Carvalho.

In the articles collected here Nancy Struever explores the basic assumption that rhetoric is not simply a bag of persuasive tricks, but functions, necessarily, as a mode of inquiry investigating not simply the mechanics of production and reception of discourse, but the psychological factors of reason and passion engaged by the assertion, modification, and contest of beliefs and dispositions of the civil communities. The first section looks both at contemporary historians employing rhetorical constructs and tactics and at contemporary accounts of the employment of rhetorical pedagogical material and theoretical texts in medieval and Renaissance cultural practices. The second set of articles considers change and continuity in the rhetorical exploitation's of genre forms in cultural programs, focuses on the strong reorientation of Classical forms of moral inquiry, on the ingenious use of the proverb, of etymology, of the exemplum, as well as on the changes in strategies in the theater, the novel, and art criticism. The final section deals with the strong historical interconnections of rhetoric with other disciplines: the motives and investigative tactics of medicine and rhetoric in the Renaissance and Early Modernity, and the shared interests and interwoven careers of rhetoric and law.

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne's Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern western university. Volume one focuses on contexts from within Montaigne's own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume two focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book's significance in literary and intellectual history. Montaigne's is now usually understood to be the school of late humanism or of Pyrrhonian scepticism. This study argues that the school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. For the Essais were shaped by a battle that had intensified since the Reformation and that would continue through to the pre-Enlightenment period. It was a battle to regulate the educated individual's judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era. The study draws on new ways of approaching literary history through the history of the book and of reading. The Essais are treated as a mobile, transnational work that travelled from Bordeaux to Paris and beyond to markets in other countries from England and Switzerland, to Italy and the Low Countries. Close analysis of editions, paratexts, translations, and annotated copies is informed by a distinct concept of the social context of a text. The concept is derived from anthropologist Alfred Gell's notion of the 'art nexus': the specific types of actions and agency relations mediated by works of art understood as 'indexes' that give rise to inferences of particular kinds. Throughout the two volumes the focus is on the particular nexus in which a copy, an edition, an extract, is embedded, and on the way that nexus might be described by early-modern people.

Introduction -- The first Jesuits as university students at Paris and Padua -- The battle of Messina and the Jesuit Constitutions -- Messina and Catania 1563 to 1678 -- The attempt to enter the University of Turin -- The Padua disaster -- The Civic-Jesuit University of Parma -- The Civic-Jesuit University of Mantua -- Two new universities in the marches: Fermo and Macerata -- The bishop says no: Palermo and Chambéry -- The Jesuits and the University of Bologna -- The battle over Canon Law in Rome -- The Jesuits and the University of Perugia -- Jesuit mathematicians in the Universities of Ferrara, Pavia, and Siena -- Philosophical and pedagogical differences -- The Jesuit contribution to theological education -- Conclusion

Fifteen of these essays by one of the leading authorities on Renaissance Platonism explore the complex philosophical, hermeneutical, and mythological issues addressed by the Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99). Ficino was the pre-eminent Platonist of his time and a distinguished philosopher, scholar and magus who had an enormous influence on the intellectual and cultural life of two and a half centuries, and who is one of the most important witnesses to the preoccupations of his age, above all to its fascination with ancient poetry and philosophy and their uneasy accommodation as an ancient "theology" with Christianity. Two further essays treat of cognate themes taken up by Ficino‘s younger friend and rival, the dazzling prince of Concordia, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), who was fascinated by Platonism in his youth but also by other philosophical legacies from the past, including Cabala and the Scholastic Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages. This volume‘s initial essay serves as an introduction to the comprehensive phenomenon of Renaissance Platonism.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was the most versatile humanist of the fifteenth century: author of numerous compositions in both Latin and Italian, and a groundbreaking theorist of painting, sculpture, and architecture. His Latin writings owe much to the model of Petrarch (1304-1374), the famed poet of the Italian Canzoniere, but also a prolific author of Latin epistles, biographies, and poems that sparked the revival of classical culture in the early Italian Renaissance. The essays collected here reflect some thirty years of research into these pioneers of Humanism, and offer important insights into forms of Renaissance 'self-fashioning' such as allegory and autobiography.

At the political and religious crossroads where John Calvin and the Protestant Reformation had taken hold, the Catholic Diocese of Geneva struggled to convert their Protestant neighbors back to the Catholic Church while maintaining a tradition of piety and a firm disciplinary hand. This critical study examines the success of Catholic counter-reform in key rural villages and looks at the significant role played by Bishop François de Sales, who had the unusual challenge of dealing with the two political authorities of Savoy and France. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources, including visitation records of bishops and other diocesan documents, Jill Fehleison contributes to our understanding of early modern Catholicism as it addressed the challenges of coexisting with Protestantism.