Overview

The Renaissance movement known as humanism spread from Italy through all of Western Europe, transforming early modern culture in ways that are still being felt and debated. Central to these debates-and to this book-is the question of whether (and how) the humanist movement contributed to the secularization of western cultural traditions at the end of the Middle Ages. A preeminent scholar of Italian humanism, Riccardo Fubini approaches this question in a new way-by redefining the problem of secularization more carefully to show how humanists can at once be secularizers and also religious thinkers. The result is a provocative vision of the humanist movement. Humanism and Secularization offers a nuanced account of humanists contesting medieval ideas about authority, not in order to reject Christianity or even orthodoxy, but to claim for themselves the right to define what it meant to be a Christian. Fubini analyzes key texts by major humanists - such as Petrarch, Poggio, and Valla - from the first century of the movement. As he subtly works out these authors' views on religion and the church from both biographical and textual information, Fubini reveals in detail the new historical consciousness that animated the humanists in their reading of classical and patristic texts. His book as a whole shows convincingly just how radical the humanism of the first half of the fifteenth century was, and how sharply it challenged well entrenched ideas and institutions. Appearing here in English for the first time, his work provides a model set of readings of humanist texts, and a critical perspective on Italian humanism that will alter and enrich discussion and understanding of the nature of the humanist movement throughout the English-speaking world.

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9780822330028

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Reviews

[A] provocative vision of the humanist movement. --Translation Review This is an important, densely argued, and deeply learned book. Fubini's approach represents the best in a postwar Italian historicist tradition... [A] provocative and interesting book. Its virtues lie not only in Fubini's learning, which is prodigious, but also in his analytical method, which is context-sensitive, intertextual, and sparklingly alive with intellectual agility. --Christopher S. Celenza, The Catholic Historical Review [T]his learned, witty and provocative book is extremely rich and instructive for anybody who has an interest in Renaissance thought, and makes us wish that also some other of Fubini's voluminous studies will soon become available in English. --Marcello Simonetta, Annali d'italianistica These five essays should be required reading for every student of Quattrocento intellectual history. Their argument illuminates major events in the movement known as humanism, and the extensive footnotes contain an encyclopedic wealth of close readings and commentary... [T]his volume makes an important collection of Renaissance studies available to the wider readership it deserves. --David Marsh, CLIO This series of essays is thoroughly documented, containing a notes section which comprises 40 percent of the book. This section is itself a valuable resource, providing, among other things, numerous Latin experts substantiating Fubini's thesis. --Margaret Franklin, Sixteenth Century Journal Fubini's exceptional learning and sensitivity to the material makes his collection of essays accessible even to those outside of the field, while his meticulous research and careful citation of sources makes this work highly valuable to the Italian Humanist scholar... His analytical method is innovative and his learning prodigious... This book will undoubtedly become a staple for students and scholars of Italian Humanism alike. --Heather A. Sexton, Comitatus Also reviewed in Bibliotheque D'Humanisme & Renaissance and Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Listed in Journal of the History of the Ideas and boundary 2 Nugent, The Government and Politics of the European Union, Fifth Edition Nugent is clearly one of the leading authorities on the EU and writes with clarity, leaving few, if any, stones unturned... Nugent has exceeded the expectations generated by previous editions of this work. --Paul Hamilton, Canadian Journal of Political Science Also reviewed in Foreign Affairs.

Author Information

Riccardo Fubini is Professor of Renaissance History at the University of Florence. He is the author of Umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: Origini rinascimentali, critica moderna; Quattrocento fiorentino: Politica, diplomazia, cultura; and Italia quattrocentesca: Politica e dipolmazia nell’età di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Martha King is the editor of New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction, translator of Grazia Deledda’s Reeds in the Wind and Elias Portulu, and cotranslator of Luigi Pirandello’s Her Husband, published by Duke University Press.

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