Medieval aspects of Renaissance learning

Virtue in Machiavelli’s Political Thought

The interpretability of Machiavelli’s political thought relates, in the most part, to the concept of virtue and its dimensions. In Western thought, this concept has had continuity and has reached the Renaissance and Machiavelli’s times. In the Roman and Medieval tradition, philosophical, verbal, religious and even literary and historical approaches were dominant in the clarification and explana...

Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?

In his article "Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?" Kevin LaGrandeur analyzes the relationships between literary images of artificial humans associated with medieval alchemists and alchemy, their modified reemergence in the Renaissance, and how such androids may forecast the idea of a posthuman subjectivity that is connected with their present-day descendents. For examp...

Ventricular anatomy: illustrations and concepts from antiquity to Renaissance

The localization of motor and sensory activities, the “rete mirabile” and the localization of the mental processes – the seat of the soul – in the ventricles or “cells” of the brain were ancient Greek concepts which were handed down to the middle ages. Although this last concept had not fully matured during classical antiquity its basic elements can be traced to Galen’s works. Even though there...

The Evolution of the Pastoral Novel in Early Modern Spain. By Dominick Finnello. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance

The Evolution of Renaissance Classicism

The term "Renaissance classicism" refers to a fundamental attribute of the period that scholars refer to as the European Renaissance, roughly 1400–1600. Renaissance classicism was an intellectual movement that sought to mimic the literature, rhetoric, art, and philosophy of the ancient world, specifically ancient Rome. Scholars, politicians, and philosophers looked to ancient literary and artis...