Karl A. E. Enenkel

Erasmus was one of the most widely read and controversial authors of the early modern period, inspiring a broad range of reader reactions. The present volume addresses various aspects of Erasmus’s reception, including how the author’s name was sometimes used to bolster decidedly “un-Erasmian” ideals.

The Reception of Erasmus in the Early Modern Period

Wolfgang Neubner

The printed book caused an explosion of knowledge and major changes in the perception of texts. In investigating how knowledge was presented to the early modern reader, this volume treats both book-historical issues and the intersections of layout with issues of genre, content and function.

Typologies Of Formal Organisation Of Knowledge In The Printed Book Of The Early Modern Period

Cognition And The Book

Jan L. de Jong

Jeannine De Landtsheer

This volume contains sixteen papers from various disciplines dealing with the question how scholars and artists in the early modern period studied and recreated ancient history, as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period

Recreating Ancient History

This monograph throws new light on the question of authorship in the Latin literature of the early modern period. It shows that authorship was not something to be taken for granted in an empathic sense, but was chiefly to be found in the paratextual features of works – the dedication, preface, author’s portrait and so on.

Zur autorisierenden und wissensvermittelnden Funktion von Widmungen, Vorworttexten, Autorporträts und Dedikationsbildern

Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur (ca. 1350-ca. 1650)

Peter Liebregts

One of the most noticeable features of the Renaissance is what Jacob Burckhardt called the rise of the individual - in politics and religion, in its social life and in the arts, and in the mentality of Renaissance man, with his inclination to explore, to invent and to make new discoveries. Yet this characteristic is also very puzzling to modern people, who see that although the categories of art which depict particular people increased to a spectacular degree in a period when biography and portrait painting were among the most popular genres, and autobiography began to emerge as a genre in itself and painters began to produce self-portraits, an interest individuals is not necessarily the same thing as the more recent interest in the purely personal aspects of individuals. Literary and artistic traditions, social and ideological backgrounds, and the motives for the production of literature have changed profoundly: Renaissance biography and autobiography, portraiture and self-portraiture have little to do with their modern counterparts. Therefore this book stresses that the Renaissance is not predominantly a mirror of modernity, but rather a period of stimulating difference or alterity. The contributors to this collection of essays aim to create a better understanding of Renaissance biographies and portraits through the analysis and reconstruction of the traditions, contexts, backgrounds and circumstances of their production.

Epistola posteritati

Paul J. Smith

This volume tries to map out the intriguing amalgam of different, partly conflicting approaches that shaped early modern zoology. It demonstrates that theology and philology played a pivotal role in the complex formation of this new science.

Karl A. E. Enenkel

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