Overview

In Secrets: Humanism, Mysticism, and Evangelism in Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, and Marguerite de Navarre, Jacob Vance argues that Erasmus and French Evangelical humanists made secrecy central to their literary thought. They revived Scriptural, medieval, and early Renaissance notions of secrecy in their spiritual and profane literature to advance the reforms in church and society that they advocated. Erasmus, Briçonnet, and Marguerite expanded on Origenian, Augustinian, and pseudo-Dionysian concepts of divine mystery, as being secret, throughout their works. By developing the idea that the divine remains both transcendent and immanent in the world of creation, these humanists explored, through literature, how the human spirit can either accede, or fail to accede, to the secrets of Christian wisdom.

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9789004281240

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Although Jacob Vance explores a wide range of disciplines and written works, the volume is meticulously researched. In addition, the author constructs a cohesive and compelling argument about these writers and their intellectual, intertextual, and theological exchanges. Leanna Bridge Rezvani, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 333-335.

Author Information

Jacob Vance, Ph.D. (2004), The Johns Hopkins University, is a visiting scholar at Harvard University and a teacher at the New England Conservatory. He has published articles on Guillaume Briçonnet, Erasmus, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Marguerite de Navarre, and Montaigne.

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