Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.
Coluccio Salutati was an Italian Renaissance humanist and notary, and one of the most important political and cultural leaders of Renaissance Florence; as chancellor of the Florentine Republic and its most prominent voice, he was effectively the permanent secretary of state in the generation before the rise of the powerful Medici family.
Leonardo Bruni or Leonardo Aretino was an Italian humanist, historian and statesman, often recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. He has been called the first modern historian. He was the earliest person to write using the three-period view of history: Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern. The dates Bruni used to define the periods are not exactly what modern historians use today, but he laid the conceptual groundwork for a tripartite division of history.
Renaissance humanism was a worldview centered on the nature and importance of humanity, that emerged from the study of Classical antiquity. This first began in Italy and then spread across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the term humanist referred to teachers and students of the humanities, known as the studia humanitatis, which included the study of Latin and Ancient Greek literatures, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. It was not until the 19th century that this began to be called humanism instead of the original humanities, and later by the retronym Renaissance humanism to distinguish it from later humanist developments. During the Renaissance period most humanists were Christians, so their concern was to "purify and renew Christianity", not to do away with it. Their vision was to return ad fontes to the simplicity of the Gospels and of the New Testament, bypassing the complexities of medieval Christian theology.
Lorenzo Valla was an Italian Renaissance humanist, rhetorician, educator and scholar. He is best known for his historical-critical textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, therefore attacking and undermining the presumption of temporal power claimed by the papacy. Lorenzo is sometimes seen as a precursor of the Reformation.
Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Literary Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly by the Renaissance humanism movement. This style of Latin is regarded as the first phase of the standardised and grammatically "Classical" Neo-Latin which continued through the 16th–19th centuries, and was used as the language of choice for authors discussing subjects considered sufficiently important to merit an international audience.
The I Tatti Everyday Renaissance Library is a book series published by the Tatti University Press, which aims to present important works of Italian Renaissance Latin Literature to a modern audience by printing the original Latin text on each left-hand leaf (verso), and an English translation on the facing page (recto). The idea was initially conceived by Walter Kaiser, former professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard and director of the Villa I Tatti. Its goal is to be the Italian Renaissance version of the Loeb Classical Library. James Hankins, Professor of History at Harvard University, is the General Editor.
Classical republicanism, also known as civic republicanism or civic humanism, is a form of republicanism developed in the Renaissance inspired by the governmental forms and writings of classical antiquity, especially such classical writers as Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero. Classical republicanism is built around concepts such as liberty as non-domination, self-government, rule of law, property-based personality, anti-corruption, abolition of monarchy, civics, civil society, common good, civic virtue, popular sovereignty, patriotism and mixed government.
In classical scholarship, the editio princeps of a work is the first printed edition of the work, that previously had existed only in manuscripts. These had to be copied by hand in order to circulate.
Paul Oskar Kristeller was a scholar of Renaissance humanism. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1992. He was last active as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, where he mentored both Irving Louis Horowitz and A. James Gregor.
Hans Baron was a German-American historian of political thought and literature. His main contribution to the historiography of the period was to introduce in 1928 the term civic humanism.
James Sloss Ackerman was an American architectural historian, a major scholar of Michelangelo's architecture, of Palladio and of Italian Renaissance architectural theory.
Guido Ruggiero is a preeminent historian of the history of Italy, from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. He is Professor of History and Cooper Fellow of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami, Emeritus. A master of Italian archival repositories, his work has forged new paths in the historical analysis of gender, sex, crime, violence, magic, science, and everyday life and culture. His later works also exemplify the fruits of combining the discipline of literary analysis with history. Ruggiero is one of the most prolific and groundbreaking scholars in his field. His monographs include Violence in Early Renaissance Venice, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power from the End of the Renaissance, Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self and Society in Renaissance Italy, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento, Love and Sex in a Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance. In addition to his own single-authored books, Ruggiero has edited with James Farr Historicizing Life-Writing and Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe ; co-edited and translated with Laura Giannetti Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance and edited The Blackwell Companion to the Renaissance. He served as both series editor for Studies in the History of Sexuality (1985-2002) for Oxford University Press and co-editor of the six-volume Encyclopedia of European Social History for Scribner’s (2002). With Edward Muir, Ruggiero edited select articles from the Italian journal Quaderni Storici, making them accessible to English-speaking audiences in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspectives, Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, and History from Crime. Ruggiero has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and academic awards of distinction. Among them are the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor in Residence at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence, the Rome Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome, and membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Barbara Josephine Lewalski was an American academic, an authority on Renaissance literature particularly known for her work on John Milton.
Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies is a center for advanced research in the humanities located in Florence, Italy, and belongs to Harvard University. It houses a collection of Italian primitives, and of Chinese and Islamic art, as well as a research library of 140,000 volumes and a collection of 250,000 photographs. It is the site of Italian and English gardens. Villa I Tatti is located on an estate of olive groves, vineyards, and gardens on the border of Florence, Fiesole and Settignano.
Brian P. Copenhaver is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at The University of California, Los Angeles. He teaches and writes about philosophy, religion and science in late medieval and early modern Europe.
Founded in 1945, with its first volume published in 1960, the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum is a scholarly journal documenting the work of international scholars interested in classical tradition during the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Robert D. Black is an emeritus professor of Renaissance history at the University of Leeds.
Susanna Berger is an American art historian. She is associate professor of Art History and Philosophy at the University of Southern California.
