Brill's Studies in Intellectual History Online, Supplement 2020

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The first Online Collection of Brill’s flagship series in Intellectual History (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History) presents new approaches to history, the history of philosophy and theology, and the history of ideas. Special attention is given to the use of interdisciplinary methods and insights, such as those of cultural anthropology, semiotics and linguistic analysis. Occasionally volumes contain papers of eminent scholars and proceedings of conferences, which would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History includes the subseries Brill's Studies in Art, Art History and Intellectual History and Brill's Texts and Sources in Intellectual History.

Brill´s Studies in Intellectual History Online, Supplement 2020 will include all titles published in the series Brill´s Studies in Intellectual History with copyright year 2020. The title list and free MARC records are available for download here.

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In this 3-volume set of primary sources, Lionel Laborie and Ariel Hessayon bring together a wide range of vital sources for the study of prophecy in the early modern world. This meticulously edited collection includes rare material and fascinating manuscripts published in English for the first time. Volumes are organised geographically, each with its own introduction by a specialist. Together with their respective contributors, they show how prophecies circulated widely throughout this period at all levels of society. Indeed, they often emerged in times of crisis and were delivered as warnings as well as signals of hope. Moreover, they were constantly adapted and translated to suit ever changing contexts – including those for which they had not been originally intended.

Contributors include: Viktoria Franke, Monika Frohnapfel, William Gibson, Mayte Green, Marios Hatzopoulos, Jacqueline Hermann, Ariel Hessayon, Warren Johnston, Lionel Laborie, Adelisa Malena, Andreas Pečar, Martin Pjecha, Michael Riordan, Luís Filipe Silvério Lima, Damien Tricoire, Leslie Tuttle, and Kristine Wirts.
Art and Catholic Renewal on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt
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The Gouda Windows (1552–1572): Art and Catholic Renewal on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt offers the first complete analysis of the cycle of monumental Renaissance stained-glass windows donated to the Sint Janskerk in Gouda, after a fire gutted it in 1552. Central among the donors were King Philip II of Spain and Joris van Egmond, Bishop of Utrecht, who worked together to reform the Church. The inventor of the iconographic program, a close associate to the bishop as well as the king, strove to renew Catholic art by taking the words of Jesus as a starting point. Defining Catholic religion based on widely accepted biblical truths, the ensemble shows that the Mother Church can accommodate all true Christians.
Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age
Co-Honorable Mention for the 2021 Book Award by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (SSEMWG)

In Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, Martha Moffitt Peacock provides a novel interpretive approach to the artistic practice of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age. From the beginnings of the new Republic, visual celebrations of famous heroines who crossed gender boundaries by fighting in the Revolt against Spain or by distinguishing themselves in arts and letters became an essential and significant cultural tradition that reverberated throughout the long seventeenth century. This collective memory of consequential heroines who equaled, or outshone, men is frequently reflected in empowering representations of other female archetypes: authoritative harpies and noble housewives. Such enabling imagery helped in the structuring of gender norms that positively advanced a powerful female identity in Dutch society.
Rembrandt: Studies in his Varied Approaches to Italian Art explores his engagement with imagery by Italian masters. His references fall into three categories: pragmatic adaptations, critical commentary, and conceptual rivalry. These are not mutually exclusive but provide a strategy for discussion.

This study also discusses Dutch artists’ attitudes toward traveling south, surveys contemporary literature praising and/or criticizing Rembrandt, and examines his art collection and how he used it. It includes an examination of the vocabulary used by Italians to describe Rembrandt’s art, with a focus on the patron Don Antonio Ruffo, and closes by considering the reception of his works by Italian artists.
In The Debate on Probable Opinions in the Scholastic Tradition, Rudolf Schuessler portrays scholastic approaches to a qualified disagreement of opinions. The book outlines how scholastic regulations concerning the use of opinions changed in the early modern era, giving rise to an extensive debate on the moral and epistemological foundations of reasonable disagreements. The debate was fueled by probabilism and anti-probabilism in Catholic moral theology and thus also serves as a gateway to these doctrines. All developments are outlined in historical context, while special attention is paid to the evolution of scholastic notions of probability and their importance for the emergence of modern probability.
Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders
The English-German collection Herder on Empathy and Sympathy: Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders considers the meaning and role of the concepts of empathy and sympathy in Herder’s thought. Herder invokes sympathy in a number of disciplinary domains ranging from metaphysics, biology, anthropology, epistemology, psychology, morality, politics, history, aesthetics to homiletics. While Herder is shown as belonging to a long line of thinkers who view sympathy as a metaphysical principle contributing to the interconnectedness of all parts of nature, he also offers new insights about intra-/inter-species sympathetic communication and distinctively human varieties of sympathy for which he reserves the term “sich einfühlen”. Acknowledging the limits of the natural capacity for “sich einfühlen”, Herder nonetheless calls for its reflective cultivation in various domains.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem and Its Reception
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In Debating the Stars, Ovanes Akopyan sheds new light on the astrological controversies that arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries after the publication of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (1496). This treatise has often been held responsible for a contemporary reassessment of the status of astrology, a discipline that attracted widespread fascination in the Renaissance. Akopyan’s reconstruction of the development of Pico’s views demonstrates that the Disputationes was a continuation of rather than a drastic rupture with the rest of his legacy. By investigating the philosophical and humanist foundations for Pico’s attack on astrological predictions, Akopyan challenges the popular assumption that the treatise was written under Girolamo Savonarola’s spell. He shows instead how it was appropriated ideologically by pro-Savonarolan circles after Pico’s death.
This book also offers a comprehensive study of the immediate reception of the Disputationes across Italy and Europe and reveals that the debates initiated by Pico’s intervention pervaded all of the European intellectual oikumene.
Over the course of his career, Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530) created altarpieces rich in theological complexity, elegant in formal execution, and dazzlingly brilliant in chromatic impact. This book investigates the spiritual dimensions of those works, focusing on six highly-significant panels. According to Steven J. Cody, the beauty and splendor of Andrea’s paintings speak to a profound engagement with Christian theories of spiritual renewal—an engagement that only intensified as Andrea matured into one of the most admired artists of his time. From this perspective, Andrea del Sarto — Splendor and Renewal in the Renaissance Altarpiece not only shines new light on a painter who has long deserved more scholarly attention; it also offers up fresh insights regarding the Renaissance altarpiece itself.
Forging Dutch and French in the Early Modern Low Countries (1540–1620)
In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French has been studied mainly from monolingual perspectives tracing the development towards modern Dutch or French. Van de Haar shows that the discussions on these languages were rooted in multilingual environments, in particular in French schools, Calvinist churches, printing houses, and chambers of rhetoric. The proposals that were formulated there to forge Dutch and French into useful forms were not directed solely at uniformization but were much more diverse.
Quietism, Jansenism, and Cartesianism
How much of our own self- interest should we be willing to sacrifice for love of another? The Quietists answered, all of it, even the salvation of our own soul. Opposing them were the Jansenists, including Arnauld, who saw self-interest as inescapable. The debate swept across French society in the 17th century, with Bossuet and Fénelon on opposite sides, and was multi- dimensional, with political and ecclesiastical intrigue, charges of heresy, and many shenanigans. Initially theological, the debate’s basis lay in differing philosophical concepts of freewill, with both sides claiming support from Descartes’s views. The debate thus highlights interpretation of the Cartesians, especially Malebranche, a prominent participant in it. Nevertheless, this is the first book on the debate in English.
The Academic Life of John Wallis (1616–1703)
Distinctions of Reason and Reasonable Distinctions is an intellectual biography of John Wallis (1616-1703), professor of mathematics at Oxford for over half a century. His career spans the political tumult of the English Civil Wars, the religious upheaval of the Church of England, and the fascinating developments in mathematics and natural philosophy. His ability to navigate this terrain and advance human learning in the academic world was facilitated by his use of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez’s theory of distinctions. This Roman Catholic’s philosophy in the hands of a Protestant divine fostered an instrumentalism necessary to bridge the old and new. With this tool, Wallis brought modern science into the university and helped form the Royal Society.
Constructions of a Glorious Past in the Early Modern Netherlands and in Europe
This monograph studies the constructions of ‘impressive’ historical descent manufactured to create ‘national’, regional, or local antiquities in early modern Europe (1500-1700), especially the Netherlands. This was a period characterised by important political changes and therefore by an increased need for legitimation; a need which was met using historical claims. Literature, scholarship, art and architecture were pivotal media that were used to furnish evidence of the impressively old lineage of states, regions or families. These claims related not only to Classical antiquity (in the generally-known sense) but also to other periods that were regarded as periods of antiquity, such as the chivalric age. The authors of this volume analyse these intriguing early modern constructions of appropriate “antiquities” and investigate the ways in which they were applied in political, intellectual and artistic contexts in Europe, especially in the Northern Low Countries.

This book is a revised and augmented translation of Oudheid als ambitie: De zoektocht naar een passend verleden, 1400–1700 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2017).
In Tracing the Visual Language of Raphael’s Circle to 1527, Alexis Culotta examines how the Renaissance master’s style – one infused with borrowed visual quotations from other artists both past and present – proved influential in his relationship with associate Baldassare Peruzzi and in the development of the artists within his thriving workshop.

Shedding new light on the important, yet often-overshadowed, figures within this network, this book calls upon key case studies to convincingly illustrate how this visual language and its recombination evolved during Raphael’s Roman career and subsequently served as a springboard for artistic innovation for these close associates as they collaborated in the years following Raphael’s death.
With a Foreword by Paolo Roberto Ciardi, an Introduction by Jean Julia Chai, and an Afterword by Alexander Marr
Lomazzo's Aesthetic Principles Reflected in the Art of his Time explores the work of the Milanese artist-theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–92) and his influence on the circle of the Accademia della Val di Blenio and beyond. Following reflections on Lomazzo's fortuna critica, the accompanying essays examine his admiration of Gaudenzio Ferrari; Lomazzo’s painted oeuvre; his influence on printmaking with Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla; on drawing and painting with Aurelio Luini; on the decorative arts and the embroideress Caterina Cantoni; his pupils Giovanni Ambrogio Figino and Girolamo Ciocca; grotesque sculpture outside Milan; and Lomazzo in England with Richard Haydocke’s translation of the Trattato. In doing so, this book takes an innovative approach—one which aims to bridge the scholarship, hitherto disjoined, between Lomazzo the artist and Lomazzo the theorist—while expanding our knowledge of a protagonist of Renaissance and early modern art theory.

Contributors: Alessia Alberti, Federico Cavalieri, Jean Julia Chai, Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Alexander Marr, Silvia Mausoli, Mauro Pavesi, Rossana Sacchi, Paolo Sanvito, and Lucia Tantardini.
Picturing Death: 1200–1600 explores the visual culture of mortality over the course of four centuries that witnessed a remarkable flourishing of imagery focused on the themes of death, dying, and the afterlife. In doing so, this volume sheds light on issues that unite two periods—the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—that are often understood as diametrically opposed. The studies collected here cover a broad visual terrain, from tomb sculpture to painted altarpieces, from manuscripts to printed books, and from minute carved objects to large-scale architecture. Taken together, they present a picture of the ways that images have helped humans understand their own mortality, and have incorporated the deceased into the communities of the living.

Contributors: Jessica Barker, Katherine Boivin, Peter Bovenmyer, Xavier Dectot, Maja Dujakovic, Brigit Ferguson, Alison C. Fleming, Fredrika Jacobs, Henrike C. Lange, Robert Marcoux, Walter S. Melion, Stephen Perkinson, Johanna Scheel, Mary Silcox, Judith Steinhoff, and Noa Turel.
The reign of philosophical optimism, or the doctrine of the ‘best of all possible worlds’ in modern European philosophy began in 1710 with the publication of Leibniz’s Theodicy, about God’s goodness and wisdom, divine and human freedom, and the meaning of evil. It ended on November 1, 1755 with the Lisbon Earthquake, which was followed by numerous attacks against optimism, starting with Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne and Candide. The years between both events were intense. In this book, Hernán D. Caro offers the first comprehensive survey of the criticisms of optimism before the infamous earthquake, a time when the foundations of what has been called the ‘debacle of the perfect world’ were first laid.
Obsolete old words from seventeenth-century English villages reflect the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, bizarre foods, magic, horses, outrageous sexism, feudal duties. New words, first appearing in print 1650–1800, reflect a middle-class culture very different from an earlier courtly culture, interested in money, coffee-houses, and self-fulfillment. The book contains chapters on pre-industrial and middle-class culture, the scientific revolution, and semantic change. They give strong evidence that new words and the new senses of old words played a key role in the British Enlightenment, its links with quantification and natural science, its tendencies towards reorganization and democracy, its redefinitions and revitalizations of women’s roles, social stereotypes, the public sphere, and the very concepts of individualism, sociability, and civilization itself. 
In Augustinian Art and Meditation in Renaissance Florence, Antonia Fondaras reunites the fifteenth-century altarpieces painted by Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Filippino Lippi, and other masters for the choir of the Augustinian church of Santo Spirito in Florence. Departing from a conventional focus on artist and patron, the author illuminates the engagement of the Augustinian Hermit friars with the composition and iconography of these pictures, and discusses how they were used to fashion the choir into a space suited to the friars’ institutional and spiritual ideals.
Fondaras includes a close reading of the choir’s most compelling and original altarpieces, which were grounded in the writings of Augustine and provided a focal point for the friars’ sophisticated meditative practices.
Andrea Palladio, Freemasonry, and the Triumph of Minerva
From Mythos to Logos: Andrea Palladio, Freemasonry and the Triumph of Minerva explores how myth was used to encode architecture and frescoed interiors with insights that promote peace, freedom and kindness as ways of being in the world. The author, Michael Trevor Coughlin argues that Freemasonry took root in the Italian city of Vicenza as early as 1546, and that its precepts, conveyed through the intersection of myth and philosophy, were disseminated widely in buildings and images, as well as texts, prescribing tolerance and an understanding of the divine that exists in each and everyone.
Weyerman’s collection of artists’ biographies (1729) is exceptional for three reasons. Firstly, he includes a great number of painters not mentioned elsewhere. Secondly, he does not limit his selection to good artists only; he also discusses failed painters and their abortive careers. Thirdly, he writes as an art critic who does not hesitate to pass judgments, sometimes severe, on his chosen subjects.

In the process, Weyerman provides much information on the social and economic circumstances of art production. He found that a bohemian lifestyle was pernicious to a painter’s career, and argued that artists should live and think as merchants. In addition to analyzing Weyerman’s art critical terminology and his ideas on art theory, De Vries includes translations of two full chapters along with the original Dutch.
15th-17th Centuries
This volume, edited by Natasha Constantinidou and Han Lamers, investigates modes of receiving and responding to Greeks, Greece, and Greek in early modern Europe (15th-17th centuries). The book's seventeen detailed studies illuminate the reception of Greek culture (the classical, Byzantine, and even post-Byzantine traditions), the Greek language (ancient, vernacular, and 'humanist'), as well as the people claiming, or being assigned, Greek identities during this period in different geographical and cultural contexts.
Discussing subjects as diverse as, for example, Greek studies and the Reformation, artistic interchange between Greek East and Latin West, networks of communication in the Greek diaspora, and the ramifications of Greek antiquarianism, the book aims at encouraging a more concerted debate about the role of Hellenism in early modern Europe that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, and opening ways towards a more over-arching understanding of this multifaceted cultural phenomenon.

Contributors: Aslıhan Akışık-Karakullukçu, Michele Bacci, Malika Bastin-Hammou, Peter Bell, Michail Chatzidakis, Federica Ciccolella, Calliope Dourou, Anthony Ellis, Niccolò Fattori, Maria Luisa Napolitano, Janika Päll, Luigi-Alberto Sanchi, Niketas Siniossoglou, William Stenhouse, Paola Tomè, Raf Van Rooy, and Stefan Weise.
The Embodied Soul in Cartesianism     
Descartes and the ‘Ingenium’ tracks the significance of embodied thought (ingenium) in the philosophical trajectory of the founding father of dualism. The first part of the book defines the notion of ingenium in relation to core concepts of Descartes's philosophy, such as memory and enumeration. It focuses on Descartes’s uses of this notion in methodical thinking, mathematics, and medicine. The studies in the second part place the Cartesian ingenium within preceding scholastic and humanist pedagogical and natural-philosophical traditions, and highlight its hitherto ignored social and political significance for Descartes himself as a member of the Republic of Letters. By embedding Descartes' notion of ingenium in contemporaneous medical, pedagogical, but also social and literary discourses, this volume outlines the fundamentally anthropological and ethical underpinnings of Descartes's revolutionary epistemology.

Contributors: Igor Agostini, Roger Ariew, Harold J. Cook, Raphaële Garrod, Denis Kambouchner, Alexander Marr, Richard Oosterhoff, David Rabouin, Dennis L. Sepper, and Theo Verbeek.
Ficino to Foucault
The sixteen essays in this volume trace the development of Platonism in the history of Western thought, starting with the revival of the Platonic tradition in the early modern period that followed the rediscovery and translation of important Greek texts. Special attention is devoted to Marsilio Ficino’s translations and commentaries; to the relationship between Platonism and Christianity; to the influence of Platonic metaphysics on the mystical tradition – in particular on Jacob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg; to the impact of idealism on the hermeneutical criticism of traditional philosophical categories and to the ways in which the so-called ‘Critique of Modernity’ promoted a new reading of the Platonic dialogues. The emphasis throughout is on demonstrating the theoretical and historical continuity of Platonism over the centuries.

Contributors are: Laura Candiotto, Pierpaolo Ciccarelli, Anna Corrias, Francesca Maria Crasta, Eva del Soldato, Laura Follesa, Guido Giglioni, Nicholas Holland, Andrea Le Moli, Brunello Lotti, Cecilia Muratori, Arnold Oberhammer, Paula Oliveira e Silva, Valery Rees, Pasquale Terracciano, and Angelo Maria Vitale.
Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives
The essays in this volume explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’ back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or today’s immigration and border control, this volume invites its readers to consider whether individual rights were in fact, or at least in theory, available to the marginalized. By focusing not only on the economically impoverished but also those who were disenfranchised because of disability, gender, race, religion or infidelity, this book also sheds light on the relationship between the early history of individual rights and social justice at the margins.

Contributors are: Wim Decock, Heikki Haara, Virpi Mäkinen, Alejandra Mancilla, Julia McClure, Ilse Paakkinen, Mikko Posti, Jonathan Robinson, John Salter, Pamela Slotte, and Jussi Varkemaa.
In Crocologia – A Detailed Study of Saffron, the King of Plants, Sally Francis and Maria Teresa Ramandi present the first translation into English of Johann Ferdinand Hertodt’s seminal 1671 work Crocologia, a book uniquely devoted to the medical uses of saffron. Hertodt discusses saffron’s origin, related species, cultivation, selection, properties and lists all its pharmaceutical preparations. Hertodt then journeys through diseases of the human body, presenting saffron-containing formulae for their treatment.

The two authors complement the translation with a biography of Hertodt, and detail saffron’s botany, current production, uses, its changing reputation as a drug, and review findings from new medical research. There is a full Glossary, and translation of a contemporary animadversion of Crocologia by Hertodt’s rival, Wenzel Maximilian Ardensbach.
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