Jill Kraye

The Renaissance, known primarily for the art and literature that it produced, was also a period in which philosophical thought flourished. This two-volume anthology, which was originally published in 1997, contains forty translations of important works on moral and political philosophy written during the Renaissance and hitherto unavailable in English. The anthology is designed to be used in conjunction with The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, in which all of these texts are discussed. The works, originally written in Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and Greek, cover such topics as: concepts of man, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and Epicurean ethics, scholastic political philosophy, theories of princely and republican government in Italy and northern European political thought. Each text is supplied with an introduction and a guide to further reading.

The author regards Montaigne as one of the architects of modern political thought, a precursor of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and the American Founding Fathers. The Essais, for Schaefer, are notable primarily on account of their formulation of a primitive version of bourgeois liberalism: the doctrine that society functions best when individuals pursue their own self-interest with a minimum of governmental interference. Montaigne, in other words, was an early Modern apostle of the gospel preached in our own time by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The impact of classical thought on Renaissance philosophy is the subject of this volume. In the first part Dr Kraye deals with the interpretations of ancient philosophy put forward by various thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, including the humanist Angelo Poliziano and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino; in the second, she examines the central role of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics within Renaissance moral philosophy and considers the influence of other classical treatises on ethics, especially the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The final section explores controversies concerning the authenticity of works in the Aristotelian canon, together with the early printing history of Aristotle. All the articles aim to locate philosophical questions within the historical and cultural context of the Renaissance, and particular attention is paid to the importance of philological scholarship within philosophical debates. The collection includes an essay on Philipp Melanchthon's ethical commentaries and textbooks which has previously appeared only in German translation.