Before Enlightenment

Timothy Kircher, Ph.D. (1989), is Hege Professor of History at Guilford College. He has published monographs and articles on Renaissance humanism, including The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Brill, 2006).

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations



1 The Riddles of Renaissance Humanism

 1 Renaissance Humanism in the History of Early Modern Ideas

 2 Finders and Seekers in Renaissance Humanism

 3 Renaissance Humanism in the History of Philosophy

 4 Literary Modalities of Humanist Expression and Overview of Chapters



2 Esse et videri: To Be and to Seem (Knowledge)

 1 Piccolomini’s Dream

 2 Quattrocento Hypocrisy: The Play of Appearances

 3 Trecento Antecedents: Appearing and Seeming in Petrarch and Boccaccio

 4 Walking Knowledge: The Transience and Accumulation of Perception

 5 Sixteenth-Century Simulations



3 The Procession of Virtue (Ethics)

 1 Reason as the Guide to Virtue: Finding the Moral Way

 2 The Virtues of Pedagogy

 3 The Morality of Rational Love

 4 Fortune’s Challenge to Virtue

 5 Laying Down the Moral Habits: Dialogues of the Dead

 6 Fortune and Folly in the Sixteenth Century



4 The Beauty of the Whole (Metaphysics)

 1 Poetica Theologia to Poetica Metaphysica

 2 Prometheus the Light-Bringer: the Mediator between Humanity and Divinity

 3 Approaching the Sun: the Upper Reaches of Humanist Conceptions of Reality

 4 Chaos Theory: the Circulation of Atomism

 5 The Limits of Vision Beneath the Earthly Veil

 6 Ontological Rupture: Momus as Alter-Prometheus

 7 The Swiftness of Time: Playing with Plutarch



5 The End of Humanism – and the Humanities?

 1 Questions of Humanism and the Humanities

 2 The End in Rabelais’s Cinq livres / Five Books

 3 Bembo’s Walking Knowledge and the Limited Outlook

 4 The Turnings of Self-Study as Humanism’s Physics and Metaphysics

Bibliography

Index