This chapter traces the publication history and animating ideas of Luciani Opuscula, a set of translations of Lucian begun as a collaboration between Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. I examine the volume’s contents, which grew over time as Erasmus kept adding to them, and the letters with which both translators prefaced their own selections, explaining to fellow humanists how the works are to be read. These interpretive letters tell us much about how the two great northern humanists understood Lucian and what role he played in their own evolution as the foremost ‘Lucianists’ of their age.

Scholars have long debated the origins of John Skelton’s idiosyncratic form of verse, the so-called “Skeltonic.” In this chapter, I suggest that the action and effect of Skeltonics are best understood through the lens of one of Skelton’s long-standing preoccupations: the attempt to simulate, in writing, the presence of a living thing. During the early sixteenth century, Humanist intellectuals argued over the proper way to represent liveliness in verse, particularly in their discussions of imitatio and enargeia. Where Skelton differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his conviction that proper imitatio requires the use of copia, an abundant style that (in his hands) aims to depict a physical thing, not merely as it appears frozen in a single moment, but as it moves and breathes through time. After putting Skelton’s work into conversation with contemporary theories of imitatio and copia, I turn to two of his best-known poems, “Speke Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” which attempt to replicate living bodies in predcisely this way while also expressing some skepticism towards the politics of this procedure.

Cambridge was at the very heart of national events and the great political and religious changes of the Tudor period. By Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, the University was closer to royal power than it had ever been. The author explains how and why the Tudor monarchs became so involved in Cambridge and examines the crisis of Henry VIII’s Break from Rome, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Protestant Reformation. The author includes key figures in Cambridge such as Lady Margaret Beaufort, John Fisher, Erasmus and Thomas Cranmer. She also looks at the early Cambridge Protestant reformers such as Latimer, Ridley and Matthew Parker, who secretly discussed Luther’s ideas at the White Horse Tavern near King’s Parade.

Shakespeare builds on virtue ethics’ concern with basic cognitive functions linking attention and intention to sociability and future-oriented deliberation. Aristotle’s virtue ethics, stressing the cultivation of habitual attentiveness to avoiding excess and deficiency is consonant with archaic Greek poetry’s depiction of the divine, human, and natural realms as three mutually interpenetrative orders, each characterized by hierarchical reciprocities whose balancing of forces and claims constitute sociable ecosystems. Similar presentations of mutually interpenetrative, ecosociable divine, human, and natural realms shape the presentation of virtue in Sanskrit epic and African, Australian, and Amerindian oral traditions. In his “Complaint of Peace,” Erasmus recuperates ecosociability for early modernity in the guise of nature infused by divine love. Its instantiation in moral-social life demands a virtue ethics interfusing shrewdness (metis) and righteousness (themis), as in Hesiod. Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard II how failures of virtue rooted in thinking of the state as a possession or entitlement rather as an ecosociable order yield both monstrousness and chaos, while in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare probes the extent to which what is lost by such failures in familial life may be retrieved.

On a cultural level, the Italian Renaissance lifted Europe into a new era of humanism that glorified humanity and shifted attention to the present needs and desires of people. Erasmus translated this humanistic attitude into scholarly pursuits that revealed the frailties and needs of the human authors of Scripture. All of these forces eroded the authority of the Church, leading to dramatic confrontation, both from inside and outside the Church. The Protestant Reformation took advantage of the rift between Christian monarchs and the papacy, successfully fragmenting the unity of Western Christendom. However, it was Copernicus who used the strategy and tools of reasoned arguments to arrive at his heliocentric theory of planetary motion. This bold assertion successfully demonstrated a truth arrived at through reason that differed from the conclusion supported by the authority of the Church. As a result, reason triumphed over faith, and the age of science began. While psychology remained obscured within philosophy and religion during this time, the enduring questions still perplexed scholars and were about to be addressed directly over two centuries of philosophical inquiries prior to psychology’s formal definition as a distinct science.

Chapter 5 explores the distinct dynamics of Plutarch reception in England prior to the famous 1579–1603 translations of Thomas North (1535–1604). In England at this time, Plutarch’s work was read largely through a Ciceronian lens. I reflect on the vernacular translations of Plutarch’s moral essays by Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), Thomas Blundeville (1522–1606), Richard Taverner and Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) as well as explore the place of Plutarch in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). I argue that prior to the translations of Thomas North, Plutarch was read predominantly in England as a thinker whose political insights were secondary to his moral ones. While the increasing precariousness of the English realm into the latter sixteenth century changed the tone of political thought, the English never read their Plutarch in the vernacular with the same attention to the nature of public office and the public realm in the way prevalent in France earlier in the century.

This chapter discusses an underexplored and relatively unappreciated, but essential, aspect of Samuel Johnson’s writing and thinking: his intellectual relationship with Renaissance humanism. Looking at representative figures such as Sir Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, and Michel de Montaigne, Lee explores the influence these writers and thinkers had upon Johnson, describing his lifelong interest in the kinds of scholarly works for which they were known (dictionary, scholarly edition, biography, satire, skeptical essay) and also detecting their presence in Johnson’s moral and philosophical commitment to an “active” life, and even in his very prose style. In so doing so, the chapter concludes that Johnson embraced Renaissance humanism while simultaneously adapting it into a project relevant and responsive to the demands of his own day and age – and, indeed, suggesting a model for our own potential humanism today.

This chapter views the relationship of humanism to medieval school traditions through the prism of Erasmus, the most outspoken and influential critic of the schools among those who embraced the “new learning” in the early sixteenth century. On close examination, the case of Erasmus suggests a less dichotomous view of intellectual change than polemical rhetoric can imply. The choice between humanism and scholasticism was not absolute. Erasmus illustrates how the new learning aggregated itself to old methods and traditions in theology, without necessarily replacing them.

Spinoza developed a method of biblical interpretation which has guided most scholars ever since. It requires an understanding of the scriptural languages, a comparison of different discussions of the same topic (not assuming that Scripture, as the word of God, must be consistent), and an account of the authorship, date, circumstances, and transmission of each book. Renaissance humanists like Erasmus had anticipated some of his method, but Spinoza was more systematic and bolder: not only did Moses not write the Pentateuch, many of the traditional assumptions about the authorship of biblical books were mistaken. A late editor, working on now lost mss. of earlier histories, had compiled them. Spinoza writes mainly about the Hebrew Bible, but also draws challenging conclusions about the New Testament: the apostles didn’t write with prophetic authority; James was right (against Paul) to emphasize works over faith. He also suggests that the apostles probably wrote in Aramaic, so that the Greek text is a translation of a lost original. Like Erasmus, he emphasizes the moral teachings of Scripture and avoids philosophical speculations, of which the doctrine of original sin is probably the most important example. His advocacy of theological minimalism furthered the cause of religious liberty.

This chapter focuses on just war theory as an approach to Shakespeare and war. It gives an overview of different theories of war and illustrates their significance in the Elizabethan historical context. This includes a discussion of the most important readings of Shakespeare as a realist or a pacifist and a subsequent analysis of Shakespeare’s use of just war theory. Drawing on a variety of examples, this chapter exemplifies what is considered a just cause, a right intention, or a legitimate authority in Shakespeare’s plays; the analysis shows who is presented as culpable or responsible and under which circumstances the relation between the cause and cost of a war must be considered out of balance. The author traces this line of argument along illustrative readings of 3 Henry VI, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and Troilus and Cressida and suggests that just war theory may offer another perspective on Shakespeare and war.

Turns to the metaphorical usefulness of the box, which may be troubling because its contents are unknown, unexpected or dangerous, as epitomised by Portia’s caskets in The Merchant of Venice. Bassanio is the only suitor to realise that ‘the outward shows be least themselves’. These familiar theatrical boxes signal Hamlet’s anxiety that people, things, and words might have ‘that within which passes show’.

Two such boxes are pervasive in early modern writing: Plato’s Silenus, and the proverbial apothecary’s painted box. Repeatedly invoked from Erasmus to the King James Bible, these are favourite images for the challenges of interpretation. The Silenus requires the reader to get beyond its outside to locate hidden truths. The painted box necessitates a more cautious negotiation of its exterior. Both illustrate how the crisis of hermeneutics inherent in a box – the processes required to open it, and how to discern what might be inside – materialises assumptions about the superiority of hidden things. The chapter reveals how, in its renaissance as a persistent and versatile image in early modern writing, the box itself becomes as significant as what it might or might not contain.

Books and boxes were found in close proximity; before bookshelves, chests were the most obvious place to store books, and the physical features of a bound book often made it visually analogous to a box. The material and tactile connections between book and box play into common metaphors of the book as a receptacle for textual riches, and the chapter brings together responses to the book as box-like object from Erasmus to early seventeenth-century English Protestants, from humanist treatises to portraits. In considering literary and visual encounters with the codex, discussion focuses on the significance of external surfaces, such as gold, blackness, and embroidery, in the fashioning of these inherently box-like objects. While reformers insisted on the Word of God as the only vehicle of truth, they could not escape the fact that it had to be contained in books, unavoidably material receptacles with insides and outsides that could shape and inscribe each other. Protestants remained sensitive to the metaphorical potential of an object with insides and outsides, and this chapter demonstrates that the identity of the ‘book’ was more complex than 'sola scriptura' suggested.

What to focus on in an intellectual history of ius gentium et naturae for a volume on the relations between international law and Christianities? For centuries, (international) law and Christian theology maintained intensive and complex relations, which it is impossible to do justice to within the scope of this chapter. With the more recent “turn to history” in international legal scholarship, discussions of the relationship between ius gentium et naturae and Christianity generally center on secularization and/or empire. For obvious reasons both sets of histories deal with early modernity – the time that the so-called Respublica Christiana or Holy Roman Empire was profoundly affected by Reformations, gradually fragmented, and religious and theological fights were part of the politics of the newly emerging European nation-states.

After performing ritual gestures of mourning, Job’s friends sat with him in silence for seven days and seven nights. They ‘thoght that he wolde not have hearkened to their counsel’, the annotators of the Geneva Bible explained.1 Early modern English culture acknowledged bereavement as a harrowing experience and recognised the challenges consolers faced when trying to offer solace. Overwhelmed by the loss of a loved one, grief-stricken mourners might, like Job, be reluctant to accept the remedies of religion and philosophy. To be sure, those who indulged in excessive sorrow were castigated, but so were consolers when their insistence on faith and reason was felt to betray a lack of sympathy for the bereaved. The fictitious author of an answer letter included in Angel Day’s The English Secretorie, a letter-writing manual published in 1586, pointed out the inefficiency of the consolatory epistle sent to him by his ‘brother’, whose severity, he implied, was ill advised: ‘Follie were it for mee to thinke or you to beleeue, that the pensiue imagination of a thing so neere … coulde with the vehemencie of a fewe specches (more of zeale then equitie deliuered) be sodenly remooued’.2 The multiplication of formal templates for such replies shows that in England as well as on the Continent, consolation came to be perceived as a dialogic exchange.3 Epistolary practice and friendly ‘conversation’ opened up a conceptual space for debating the ethical and rhetorical limits of consolation.4

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

Scholars haveestablished that Rome is at once a place and an idea. This double formula, however, which limits Rome to a specific distant place (distant, that is, from the perspective of Britain) and an idea (that is, an immaterial concept or notion of that distant place), needs to be supplemented by an acknowledgement that the Roman Empire had left in its wake material remains and cultural practices that ensured that Rome could always be close-to-hand, familiar, and domestic—even a thousand or more miles from the Eternal City. Ruins, roads, the Latin language and the thickets of its grammar, cultural and spiritual institutions, liturgical texts and devotional regimens: these phenomena ensured that Rome could be, even as far away as Medieval or Renaissance Britain, experienced as near rather than far, and as a network of material remains and cultural practices rather than as an abstract idea. The book gathers these disparate phenomena under the rubric of the ‘fact’ of Rome (with an eye to the word’s derivation from the Latin factum) in an effort to show that lives lived in Medieval and Renaissance Britain were continually immersed in versions of Rome that oscillated between conspicuousness and invisibility.

It was consistent with both humanism and the growth of political bureaucracy that humanisticallyeducated ‘new men’ took roles as counsellors in the courts of both early Tudor kings. This chapter explores the role of the counsellor in the work of three leading Renaissance humanists: Erasmus, More and Castiglione. Each accepted that good counsel should, to varying degrees, rule the prince. At the heart of their writings remains, however, a question about the efficacy of counsel in a hereditary monarchy. Often overlooked in this debate is importance of Seneca, who provides the basis for the discussion of the effectiveness of counsel in all three writers’ works, contrasting principles learned through instruction from precepts gathered through counsel.

During the Middle Ages, the justification of humanity increasingly came to be linked with an explicitly sacramental economy of salvation, with a particular emphasis upon the sacramenta mortuorum (baptism and penance) as the divinely ordained means of establishing and restoring justification. This chapter considers this development, which forged an increasingly robust link between the practice of justification and the institution of the church. Although the possibility of extra-sacramental justification was recognised, the normative account of the initiation and restoration of justification was now firmly linked with the sacramental ministry of the church. This chapter explores the development of this move, and considers its implications. In closing, it turns to deal with some trends in Renaissance biblical scholarship which opened up new and important questions in relation to the theory and practice of justification, such as the revision of the accepted words of Christ on beginning his ministry from ‘Do penance, for the kingdom of God is at hand’ to ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand’.

Because there was no equivalent in Renaissance England to the Roman Forum and Senate, the stage actor was free to inherit the mantle of Cicero and Quintilian. I shall ask in this chapter how far stage actors did in practice follow a path mapped out by the ancient orators. Italian accounts of the actor’s art: De Sommi, Cecchini and Scala were Italian stage directors who contested appropriation of the rhetorical tradition by intellectuals, and the improvisatory tradition placed them as makers of embodied speech. Erasmus and the act of speaking: although Erasmus fostered a culture of the book, his sense of language was grounded in orality. Vives offers a vivid account of the fleshiness of the spoken word. A case study from ‘Merchant of Venice’ illustrates how Shakespeare wrote for different rhetorical registers. Sacred rhetoric: Erasmus straddled a tension between the Catholic tradition that emphasized form and the nascent Protestant tradition that required the preacher to be driven by the spirit. Donne and Alleyn: I focus on the relationship between England’s greatest preacher in the early seventeenth century and his son-in-law, who had been England’s greatest stage actor, bringing out the different conceptions of rhetoric.