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).

• AcknowledgementsList of Illustrations1 The Riddles of Renaissance Humanism1 Renaissance Humanism in the History of Early Modern Ideas2 Finders and Seekers in Renaissance Humanism3 Renaissance Humanism in the History of Philosophy4 Literary Modalities of Humanist Expression and Overview of Chapters2 Esse et videri: To Be and to Seem (Knowledge)1 Piccolomini’s Dream2 Quattrocento Hypocrisy: The Play of Appearances3 Trecento Antecedents: Appearing and Seeming in Petrarch and Boccaccio4 Walking Knowledge: The Transience and Accumulation of Perception5 Sixteenth-Century Simulations3 The Procession of Virtue (Ethics)1 Reason as the Guide to Virtue: Finding the Moral Way2 The Virtues of Pedagogy3 The Morality of Rational Love4 Fortune’s Challenge to Virtue5 Laying Down the Moral Habits: Dialogues of the Dead6 Fortune and Folly in the Sixteenth Century4 The Beauty of the Whole (Metaphysics)1 Poetica Theologia to Poetica Metaphysica2 Prometheus the Light-Bringer: the Mediator between Humanity and Divinity3 Approaching the Sun: the Upper Reaches of Humanist Conceptions of Reality4 Chaos Theory: the Circulation of Atomism5 The Limits of Vision Beneath the Earthly Veil6 Ontological Rupture: Momus as Alter-Prometheus7 The Swiftness of Time: Playing with Plutarch5 The End of Humanism – and the Humanities?1 Questions of Humanism and the Humanities2 The End in Rabelais’s Cinq livres / Five Books3 Bembo’s Walking Knowledge and the Limited Outlook4 The Turnings of Self-Study as Humanism’s Physics and MetaphysicsBibliographyIndex

“This fine book adds great depth and meaning to the study of Renaissance humanism. Kircher’s writing is crisp, his analyses are clear-eyed, and throughout he strikes a series of fine balances: between examinations of humanist classics with examinations of lesser known texts (often in manuscript); between Latin and vernacular; between Italian and ultramontane. Throughout, his writing is informed, but not dominated, by the history of continental philosophy.”Christopher S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University“Kircher’s insightful interpretation of […] a broad compendium of humanist writing alone makes the book a useful additional to a scholarly library. […] It provides a subtle and rich investigation of humanist thought and writing revealed though a careful and original reading of a great many texts.” Kenneth Bartlett, University of Toronto. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Fall 2023), pp. 1071–1072.“The strength of this new intellectual history is that it is not only attuned to the philosophical contributions of the early humanists, but it also considers the indirectness of literary media—including letters, dialogues, translations, orations, novels and poetry–as integral to humanist philosophy.”Eva Plesnik, University of Toronto. In: Annali d'italianistica, Vol. 40 (2022), pp. 449–451.