This book traces the intellectual life of the Kingdom of Italy, the area in which humanism began in the mid thirteenth century, a century or more before exerting its influence on the rest of Europe. ...Covering a period of over four and a half centuries, this study offers the first integrated analysis of Latin writings produced in the area, examining not only religious, literary, and legal texts. Ronald G. Witt characterizes the changes reflected in these Latin writings as products of the interaction of thought with economic, political, and religious tendencies in Italian society as well as with intellectual influences coming from abroad. His research ultimately traces the early emergence of humanism in northern Italy in the mid thirteenth century to the precocious development of a lay intelligentsia in the region, whose participation in the culture of Latin writing fostered the beginnings of the intellectual movement which would eventually revolutionize all of Europe.
How do we take stock of the state and direction of the world’s environment, and what can we learn from the experience? Among the myriad detailed narratives about the condition of the planet, the ...Global Environment Outlook (GEO) reports—issued by the United Nations Environment Programme—stand out as the most ambitious. For nearly three decades the GEO project has not only delivered iconic global assessment reports, but through its multitude of contributors has inspired hundreds of similar processes worldwide from the regional to the local level. This book provides an inside account of the evolution of the GEO project from its earliest days. Building on meticulous research, including interviews with former heads of the United Nations Environment Programme, diplomats, leading contributing scientists, and senior leaders of collaborating organizations, the story is told from the perspective of five GEO veterans who all played a pivotal role in shaping the periodic assessments. The GEO’s history provides striking insights and will save valuable time to those who commission, design and conduct, as well as critique and improve, assessments of environmental development in the next decade.
Fundamental to the modern conception of historical perspective was the position that nature had its own integrity and that a common human nature underlay human action in history. The first tenet was ...an achievement of the Scholastics, the second of Italian humanists of the fourteenth century. In order to justify the reading of ancient pagan texts an early humanist Albertino Mussato (1261-1329) had resorted to the late ancient and medieval tradition that the pagan poets had been divinely inspired to predict the coming of Christ and a number of other revealed truths. Subsequently, however, Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio (1310-75), and Salutati (1332-1406) argued that if poetic genius was a divine gift to individuals, poetic creation was a product of human effort. The consequent desanctification of the ancient writers allowed them to be approached as historical human beings. Nevertheless, the new enthusiasm for Plato beginning with Bruni (1370-1444) initiated a retreat from this position and a return to the medieval confusion between the world of grace and the world of nature. By the second half of the fifteenth century, Plato's "divine madness of the poets" was being interpreted to mean that the ancient poets had been divinely inspired to utter Christian truths.
This monograph demonstrates why humanism began in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century. It considers Petrarch a third generation humanist, who christianized a secular movement. The analysis traces the ...beginning of humanism in poetry and its gradual penetration of other Latin literary genres, and, through stylistic analyses of texts, the extent to which imitation of the ancients produced changes in cognition and visual perception.The volume traces the link between vernacular translations and the emergence of Florence as the leader of Latin humanism by 1400 and why, limited to an elite in the fourteenth century, humanism became a major educational movement in the first decades of the fifteenth. It revises our conception of the relationship of Italian humanism to French twelfth-century humanism and of the character of early Italian humanism itself.In the Footsteps of the Ancients is the recipient of the Jacques Barzun Prize 2000 in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society.This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.
How do we take stock of the state and direction of the world’s environment, and what can we learn from the experience? Among the myriad detailed narratives about the condition of the planet, the ...Global Environment Outlook (GEO) reports—issued by the United Nations Environment Programme—stand out as the most ambitious. For nearly three decades the GEO project has not only delivered iconic global assessment reports, but through its multitude of contributors has inspired hundreds of similar processes worldwide from the regional to the local level. This book provides an inside account of the evolution of the GEO project from its earliest days. Building on meticulous research, including interviews with former heads of the United Nations Environment Programme, diplomats, leading contributing scientists, and senior leaders of collaborating organizations, the story is told from the perspective of five GEO veterans who all played a pivotal role in shaping the periodic assessments. The GEO’s history provides striking insights and will save valuable time to those who commission, design and conduct, as well as critique and improve, assessments of environmental development in the next decade.
This collection of original essays, gathered in honor of distinguished historian Ronald G. Witt, explores a range of issues of interest to scholars of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. ...Contributors include Robert Black, Melissa Bullard, Anthony D'Elia, Anthony Grafton, Paul Grendler, James Hankins, John Headley, John Monfasani, and Louise Rice.
The italian humanists, like the medieval rhetoricians ordictatoresbefore them, were essentially literary men, seekers of eloquence. What distinguished them from their predecessors was a stylistic ...ideal, the imitation of ancient Latin models. Enthusiastically seeking the key to recapturing the style of the ancient pagan authors, they turned with a passion to the ancient texts and gradually honed their own philological skills and the very process of their thinking. Although a wide range of other factors favored the Italians in their efforts to understand and learn from the ancient past, their success derived immediately from their commitment to ancient
