Translation of De professione religiosorum and De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione , edited with an introduction and notes, by Olga Zorzi Pugliese.\n1. Lorenzo Valla and his works -- 
2. Analysis of the profession of the religious -- 
3. Analysis of the donation of Constantine.\nLorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was a leading humanist scholar and controversial writer of the fifteenth century. Born in Rome, he spent part of his early life in other cities in Italy teaching rhetoric. After serving as secretary to the king of Naples, Alfonso V of Aragon, from 1435 to 1448, he eventually returned to his native city where he became apostolic secretary two years before his death.\nAlthough his works, all written in Latin, treat a number of linguistic, historical or philosophical issues, his most polemical treatises are those dealing with religious questions. In “The Profession of the Religious” and “The Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine”, both circa 1440, he advocates an inner kind of spirituality that can be achieved even by the laity and he criticizes the ecclesiastical institutions for their role in exploiting the legend according to which the emperor had allegedly conferred political power on the Pope. These treatises, and especially the well-known Donation, aroused considerable interest among the Protestant reformers; they are, moreover, fascinating texts for the modern reader, too. Structured as a dialogue and an oration, respectively, they illustrate the various discursive strategies devised by the author as effective means of persuasion.

The Profession of the Religious and the Principal Arguments from the Falsely Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, 1)

Religion & Spirituality

Pughess, D.

Pugliese, Olga Zorzi

Christian Books & Bibles

Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies

Johannes Brenz (1499-1570), the reformer of the city of Schwäbisch Hall (1522-1548) and the leading churchman in the Duchy of Württemberg (1550-1570), was the most important champion of the Lutheran Reformation in Southern Germany. An articulate advocate of the view that the office of secular government includes the divinely imposed obligation to provide for the establishment and maintenance of true religion, he was also, of all the Lutheran reformers, the most gifted ecclesiastical organizer. His unique achievements as a creator of church order set a standard for others to imitate.The texts in this collection record his views on the office of Christian magistrate and chronicle the development, during his years in Schwäbisch Hall, of the essential elements of the system of church government that would be fully realized in practice and achieve broad historical significance only in the 1550s in Württemberg. As a result, the documents in this volume provide an excellent basis for tracing the development, both theoretical and practical, of the Lutheran territorial church during the early Reformation.

Godly Magistrates and Church Order: Johannes Brenz and the Establishment of the Lutheran Territorial Church in Germany, 1524-1559 (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, No. 9)

Victoria University (Toronto, Ont.)

Brenz, Johannes

Estes, James Martin

On 23 May 1498 Girolamo Savonarola, one of the most spell-binding figures of the Italian Renaissance, was publicly burned at the stake on the main piazza of Florence on trumped-up charges of heresy and sedition. Thus ended the friar's meteoric rise to power and his unprecedented influence over Florentine society. Though his ashes were unceremoniously dumped into the River Arno the moment the cinders had died away, the fire of his teachings could not be extinguished, nor could Florentines forget the riveting preacher from Ferrara who, in four short years, had turned their city upside down. Neither could Italians nor, more generally, European reformers, for they soon turned Savonarola into a prophet of renewal and into a symbol of the struggle against corruption. Whether he was one or the other or neither, is still very much under debate. This collection of texts from Savonarola's extensive body of works seeks to provide the English reader with a variety of entry points into this controv

A Guide to Righteous Living and Other Works (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, No. 10)

History

Girolamo, Savonarola

Europe

Before the 1540s French poetry had been conceived as merely versified rhetoric. Considerations of prosody and genre dominated critical thought and the models of usage proposed to poets were exclusively French. Under the influence of humanism and contacts with Italian culture, however, poets began to sense that their art was not circumscribed by rhyme schemes, rhetorical principles, and native French practices.The first "art of poetry" to enunciate these views was Joachim du Bellay's Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549). Breaking radically with tradition, Du Bellay condemned French in its current state as being inadequate for composing a poetry equal to the ancients and the modern Italians. Eschewing formal concerns, he called on the French in revolutionary terms to enrich their language and hence their poetry by borrowing words, ideas, and genres from the Greeks, the Romans, and the Italians, and to invent neologisms and new syntactic structures. Du Bellay was attacked by Thomas Sébillet, author of a rival ars poetica, for plagiarizing Latin theorists, but he and Ronsard defended his position. The texts translated here initiated a debate that refocused poetic theory onto the question of language and that influenced other theorists in France, England, and Scotland.

Poetry & Language in 16th-Century France: Du Bellay, Ronsard, Sebillet (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, No. 11)

As Michel de Montaigne pointed out, truth's opposite has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field. This volume presents thirteen case studies from Italy, Spain, England, France, and the Empire, concerning parochial and patriarchal networks of power. They address people on the margins of society, trying to manipulate boundaries, and people at the centre of power, endeavouring to conserve or enhance their position. But at their heart, all these essays raise crucial questions about the nature of truth as well as its construction and detection for pre-modern men and women. The perpetrators of these scams, their victims, and the authorities charged with policing them, grapple with the roles of authority, power, status, gender, tradition, orality, and technology as they craft their schemes or plot their courses of action. In short, they highlight sites of social, political, and epistemological tension as Europe slowly moves from the medieval to the modern.

Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650) (Essays and Studies, Volume 4)

On January 14 1559, Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England since the death of her sister Mary on November 17 1558, entered the City of London in ceremonial procession, the traditional prelude to a monarch's coronation at Westminster Abbey on the next day. The 'royal entry' was a ritual familiar throughout Europe, identifying the sovereign to his or her people, and demonstrating the power and grandeur of the monarchy. The pamphlet published a few days later - the first virtually complete record of an English royal entry - describes the progress of the Queen through the city, the decorations and the costumes of participants, the poems and songs, the ritual presentation of gifts, and the pageants that instructed her in her new role. Elizabeth's procession was designed by Richard Grafton and a group of Protestant London merchants. Its text was written by a talented young humanist and future schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster, who would later teach both the poet Edmund Spenser and the great preacher Lancelot Andrewes. Staging the procession involved courtiers, city notables, guild officials and working people; the court loaned costumes, and the Queen acted her part brilliantly. Yet at the same time as they collaborated in this great public spectacle, all the parties involved were contending for mastery of the event. The circumstances of the entry procession and the political aftermath of the pamphlet have occupied historians for four centuries, yet there has never been an accurate and fully annotated version of the work available.This edition, based on the only known copy of the first edition, presents a scholarly, modernized text, with comprehensive annotation, many illustrations, and two maps.

The Queen's Majesty's Passage & Related Documents (Tudor and Stuart Texts, Volume 4)

For medieval and early modern Europeans, contemporary culture was often refracted through the legend of Troy, arguably the most important set of stories outside the Bible for centuries of western European history. These stories were transmitted in dozens of competing versions, and contemporary local events were habitually understood in the context of a pagan legend whose origins were remote and whose mandate was ambiguous. The fifteen essays in this volume offer compelling new treatments of these now-evaporated fantasies of Troy, which were central to the European social imaginary. The essays consider texts and performances of Troy across a wide generic range, from learned court poetry to burlesque, from treatises on linguistic history to public spectacles.

Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Essays and Studies, Volume 5)

Stephen D. Powell

In 1624 Pope Urban VIII appointed Marcello Sacchetti depositary general and secret treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber, and Giulio Sacchetti bishop of Gravina. Urban later gave Marcello the lease on the alum mines of Tolfa and raised Giulio to the cardinalate. To assert their new power, the Sacchetti began commissioning works of art. Marcello discovered and promoted leading Baroque masters, such as Pietro da Cortona and Nicolas Poussin, while Giulio purchased works from previous generations. In the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV bought the collection and housed it in the Capitoline Museum, where it is now a substantial portion of the collection. By focusing on the relationship between the artists in service and the Sacchetti, this study expands our knowledge of the artists and the complexity of the processes of agency in the fulfillment of commissions. In so doing, it underlines how the Sacchetti used art to proclaim a certain public image and to promote Cardinal Giulio as a candidate to the papal throne.

Ave Papa Ave Papabile: The Sacchetti Family, Their Art Patronage, and Political Aspirations (Essays and Studies, Volume 6)

Lilian H. Zirpolo

Few illnesses in the early modern period carried the impact of the dreaded pox, a lethal sexually transmitted disease usually thought to be syphilis. In the early sixteenth century the disease quickly emerged as a powerful cultural force. Just as powerful were the responses of doctors, bureaucrats, moralists, playwrights, and satirists. These ten essays gauge the impact of sexual disease on early modern society by exploring the ways in which European culture reacted to the presence of a new deadly sexual infection. Articles about scientific and medical responses analyze how physicians incorporated the disease within existing intellectual frameworks. Studies in literary and metaphoric responses examine how early modern writers put images of sexual infection and the diseased body to a range of rhetorical and political uses. Finally, essays about institutional and policing responses chronicle how authorities responded to the crisis and how these public health responses linked up with wider campaigns to police sexuality.

Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Essays and Studies, Vol. 7)

Kevin Siena

In Florence, in the summer of 1501, a man named Antonio Rinaldeschi was arrested and hanged after throwing horse dung at an outdoor painting of the Virgin Mary. His punishment was severe, even for the times, and the crimes with which he was formally charged, gambling, blasphemy and attempted suicide, did not normally warrant the death penalty. _Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence_ unveils a series of newly discovered sources concerning this striking episode. The authors show how the political and religious context of Renaissance Florence resulted both in Rinaldeschi's death sentence and in the creation by the followers of Savonarola of a new religious devotion, in the heart of the city, commemorating the event.

Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi (Essays and Studies, Vol. 8)

William J. Connell

Giles Constable

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