Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance

by Cranz,F. Edward

• ISBN13: 9780860789833
• ISBN10: 0860789837
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-07-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The previous Variorum collection of studies by the late F. Edward Cranz focused specifically on Nicholas of Cusa. The present selection has an equally clear focus, but a far broader scope: it brings together materials on his major thesis, of a fundamental reorientation of the categories of thought in the Latin West, c. 1100 AD, a thesis that dominated his work from the 1960s onwards.The volume differs from the usual Variorum collection in that much of the material is hitherto unpublished, distributed only in 'samizdat' form to Cranz's friends and colleagues. Nancy Struever has collated and edited the versions of these papers, and supplied the necessary annotation for his references. It includes, too, some of the research related to his editions of the Late Antique Aristotelian commentator, Alexander Aphrodisiensis, and his early research on the reception of Classical and early Christian political thought, demonstrating the pertinence of this to the reorientation thesis.Cranz's argument, centring on Anselm's reading of Augustine, and Abelard's of Boethius, but dealing with Renaissance and Reformation figures such as Petrarch and Valla, Cusanus and Luther, Nifo and Zabarella, claims a reorientation in speculative genres of the most basic premises of the relations of mind, language, and reality. Cranz's meticulous close readings of the texts make the case that the reorientation was so deep and thorough as to problematise our modern readings of Hellenic thinkers such as Aristotle, and so radical as to be 'almost invisible' to the Medieval and post-Medieval thinkers. The definitions and distinctions of thematics in this collection are of intrinsic interest, then, to Classical and Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern intellectual historians. Indeed, Cranz's work vindicates serious intellectual historical inquiry as indispensable to our understanding of the basic motives and accomplishments of the culture of Pre-Modernity.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Acknowledgments	xxiii
PART I: THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT [IN THE PATRISTIC PERIOD]
I De Civitate Dei, XV, 2 and Augustine's idea of the Christian society	215-225
Speculum 25. Cambridge, MA, 1950
II Kingdom and polity in Eusebius of Caesarea	47-66	(208)
Harvard Theological Review 45. Cambridge, MA, 1952
III The development of Augustine's ideas on society before the Donatist controversy	255-316
Harvard Theological Review 47. Cambridge, MA, 1954
PART II: THE FUNDAMENTAL REORIENTATION OF WESTERN THOUGHT C. 1100AD
IV Augustine and Anselm of Canterbury	1-87	(1)
First publication
V Boethius and Abelard	1-20	(1)
First publication
PART III: THE ELABORATION OF THE 1100AD THESIS
VI St Paul and ancient modes of thought	1-28	(1)
First publication
VII Some Petrarchan paradoxes	1-21	(1)
First publication
VIII Some historical structures of reading and allegory	1-20	(1)
First publication
IX The eyes of the mind: antiquity and the Renaissance	1-21	(1)
First publication
X Two debates about the intellect:	1-22	(358)
(1) Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Greeks;
(2) Nifo and the Renaissance philosophers	1-22	(358)
First publication
XI The Renaissance reading of the De anima	359-376
Platon et Aristote à la Renaissance: XVIe Colloque international de Tours. Palis: J. Vrin, 1976
XII Quintilian as ancient thinker	219-230
Rhetorica, 13. Berkeley, CA, 1995
XIII The studia humanitatis and litterae in Cicero and Leonardo Bruni	3-26
Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History, ed. Marino and M. Schlitt. Rochester; NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001
Index	1-3