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Books
Available
Publication year: 2006
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| Series: | Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 133 |
| ISBN-13 (i)The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) has been changed from 10 to 13 digits on 1 January 2007: | 978 90 04 14637 2 |
| ISBN-10: | 90 04 14637 7 |
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| Cover: | Hardback |
| Number of pages: | xii, 320 pp. |
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| List price: | € 99.00 / US$ 147.00 |
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
I. Introduction
II. Tracking the Vagaries of Time: Anxiety and Freedom in Humanist Accounts of the Plague of 1348
III. Morality’s Hazy Mirror: The Humanist Modality of Moral Communication in the Decameron
IV. The Paradox of Experience and Moral Authority in Petrarch’s Writings
V. The Sea as an Image of Temporality
VI. The Ethics of Pleasure: Faces of the Feminine
VII. Senescence and Renascence
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
‘Like Ronald Witt’s In the Footstep of the Ancients, Kircher’s The Poet’s Wisdom sheds new light on a critical period in the emergence of modern Western thought and letters.’
David Marsh, Italian Quarterly, 2005
‘Readers... will find the textual analyses of The Poet’s Wisdom wonderfully rich and rewarding. Kircher excavates their meaning and significance while accounting for social, political, and intellectual influences upon them, and with the skills of an acute literary critic he measures them carefully against the writings of mendicant preachers. He brings to the task a comprehensive interest in the philosophy of history, textual hermeneutics, and the integral relationship between style and thought, as parenthetical references to the theoretical work of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, and G. Heath King enrich his detailed footnotes on the relevant scholarship in history, literary studies, theology, and philosophy. This is a head-clearing book that will reward scholars in all those fields.’
Wiliam Kennedy, Renaissance Quarterly, 2006
Readership
All those interested in intellectual history, the history of ideas, philosophy, Renaissance humanism and ecclesiastical history, as well as readers of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature.
About the author(s)
Timothy Kircher, Ph.D. (1989) in History, Yale University, is Associate Professor of History at Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina.
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The book explores the philosophical thinking of Petrarch and Boccaccio in contrast to the writings of contemporary mendicants. Examining both Latin and vernacular works, it investigates how these humanists poetically express the temporal, subjective, and emotional quality of moral sensibility, in a way that shifts to the reader the weight of discerning the ethical message.
The book centers its analysis on a series of paradoxes pondered by these humanists: the self that changes yet persists over time; the awareness of self-deception; the individual's validation of authority; and the ethics of pleasure.
This study is valuable to those interested in Renaissance philosophy, literature, religion, and the history of ideas.
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