The literary qualities of humanists’ writings convey how play and illusion helped form their ideas about knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics. Timothy Kircher argues for new ways of appreciating Renaissance humanist philosophy.

The essay explores humanism’s modernity by inquiring into the way the fifteenth-century humanist cultural program posited moral values and, at the same time, contributed to a sense of moral confusion. While Niccolò Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni associated ethical enlightenment with learning and even social acclaim, Leon Battista Alberti criticized these assumptions not only for their susceptibility to political manipulation but also for their failure to cultivate the attributes they promised: virtue, and by extension happiness and tranquillity. The (...) tensions in humanist culture between conformity and dissent, rational certainty and sense of mutability, generated the creative energy that we, as moderns, have come to attribute to this culture. (shrink)

The book explores the philosophical thinking of Petrarch and Boccaccio in contrast to the writings of contemporary mendicants.

Rocco Rubini’s far-ranging book proposes that an “intellectual tradition” (1) took shape in Italy beginning with the work of Francesco Petrarch (1404–1472) and found fruition in the writings of Ant...