Unlike Blake, most nineteenth-century scholars saw the creation of culture as distinct from and more interesting than its transmission.² Jacob Burckhardt, for example, treated the culture of the Renaissance as an essentially new creation rather than a mere revival of an ancient one, and deliberately relegated the study of the classics to a late and subordinate position in his work. “The essence of the phenomena,” he remarked, “might have been the same without the classical revival.”³ This attitude, rooted in Romantic beliefs about originality and intensity, died hard; but between 1870 and 1914 it gave up the ghost. In its...

Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a monster named Oannês with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil...

This piece of work attempts a study of the transmission of high culture which sets the traditional internal account of continuity and change amongst texts in a broader historical context.¹ My study singles out an individual—Erasmus of Rotterdam—in an unfamiliar way: not as a Renaissance “self” (however fashioned), but as the center to which a large, specific part of the print-related activities of a much less well-known group of authors, commendatores, emendatores, and castigatores, was directed.

It is into this textual, Erasmian context that I reinsert the published works of Rudolph Agricola. I argue that the external, shaping...

The conquest of Mexico¹ mattered to the men of the sixteenth century because it provided Spaniards and other Europeans with their first great paradigm for European encounters with an organized native state and, in the person and strategy of Cortés, a model not only for other and lesser conquistadores, but, through the swift publication in several European languages of his dispatches to his king, for a much wider audience. It matters to us because it poses a painful question: how was it that a motley bunch of Spanish adventurers, never numbering more than four hundred or so, were able to...

“Custom is second nature” (consuetudo altera natura).¹ This has been a commonplace, though a debatable commonplace, at least since Aristotle. Primary Nature has been worshiped in many ways—has been matrified as well as deified—but Custom has enjoyed no such conceptual respect. While there have been countless historical and philosophical discussions of the “idea of nature,” no serious effort has been made, so far as I know, to study the “idea of custom” in a comprehensive and critical fashion—nothing comparable, say, to R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of Nature or to Robert Lenoble’s Idée de La nature.² Yet as...

Of the present king, who as a young man of fourteen years became the ruler of this large empire after his uncle Mustafa’s deposition . . . , such a good opinion was conceived that it produced in everybody’s heart a deep expectation of his success. It was universally thought that he would become the best prince the Ottoman house ever had. But in a matter of a few years, he showed how human judgment fails to anticipate future events. For just as one cannot be sure of the serenity of the day from the splendor of a fine morning,...

In the fall of 1642, at the outbreak of the English Civil War, a pamphlet appeared in London titled The Valiant Resolution of the Prentices of London and purporting to express the sentiments of more than 8,000 London apprentices who were enlisting in the Parliamentary army. The Resolution begins by extolling “the famous city of London,” which “hath ever been fruitful in noble and heroic spirits, who have performed wonders of magnanimity and valor in foreign parts, for the everlasting honor and glory of their country.”¹ Notice the key words in this opening fanfare: “noble,” “heroic,” “magnanimity,” “valor,” “honor and...

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, there appeared in France a philosophical literature of explicit atheism. It claimed, among other things, that no “proofs” of the existence of God were demonstrative or even plausible; that the idea of God was either self-contradictory or otherwise absurd; and that a universe understood without reference to a Supreme Being either was no more or, indeed, was less problematic than a universe understood to stand in some relationship to such a God. This atheism would become a significant current of Enlightenment thought by the late eighteenth century. It first occurred, in written...

Few historical topics are harder to handle with clarity, sensitivity, and accuracy than shifts in the sensibilities, mental structures, or moral codes that govern human behavior. In the first place one is usually dealing—certainly in the West since the sixteenth century—with moods and systems of value that may appear to be prevalent at certain times but are never universally held and are always in unstable competition with others. Second, each social grouping tends to live in its own mental world, which is sometimes quite similar to those of other social classes, but is never quite the same and...