Continuities and Disruptions between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Proceedings of the Colloquium held at the Warburg Institute, 15–16 June 2007, Jointly Organised by the Warburg Institute and the Gabinete de Filosofia Medieval ed. by Charles Burnett, José Meirinhos, Jacqueline Hamesse (review)

REVIEWS 244 fewer argue for their beliefs, and still fewer in a serious way. Presumably, declaring anyone an author of works of serious philosophical significance implies that he or she belongs in this last and exclusive camp. One weakness of Conley’s informative volume is his tendency to declare the beliefs of the PortRoyal abbesses without presenting or analyzing the arguments for their beliefs. The reader is frequently left to wonder whether this is due to the lack of arguments in the works of the nuns themselves, or to a failure of the author to cover the arguments the nuns do in fact provide. In either case, the thesis of the book remains unsubstantiated. THOMAS WARD, Philosophy, UCLA Continuities and Disruptions between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Proceedings of the Colloquium held at the Warburg Institute, 15–16 June 2007, Jointly Organised by the Warburg Institute and the Gabinete de Filosofia Medieval, ed. Charles Burnett, José Meirinhos, and Jacqueline Hamesse (Turnhout: Brepols 2008) x + 181 pp. Did the Renaissance principally follow cultural trajectories established in the Middle Ages or was it primarily a time of innovation, marking in numerous fields an abrupt break with the customs and traditions of the medieval past? The question of course is not new. Perhaps the most famous argument for periodizing the Renaissance is found in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), whose thesis that the Renaissance was a distinct period marking the rise of the individual and the emergence of modern man, still resonates with many cultural and intellectual historians today. More recently, scholars have sought to explore distinctions between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance through a narrower lens. To this end, the Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales organized a conference at the Warburg Institute on 15–16 June 2007 from which eight papers have been revised and published under the conference title, Continuities and Disruptions Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Each of these eight case studies explores how a particular field or theoretical concept developed from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Each scholar examines which aspects of these developments are traceable to medieval institutions, conventions , and modes of thought, and which are more compellingly viewed as Renaissance inventions that interrupted medieval tradition. Only a few of the essays can be summarized here. Jill Kraye contributes significantly toward documenting the discovery, interpretation, and dissemination of classical philosophy in the early modern era by focusing her inquiry on Stoicism . Most of Aristotle’s works were available in Latin by the late Middle Ages, but the Peripatetics received new interpretations during the Renaissance after several Greek commentaries on Aristotle became translated. More dramatic were the Renaissance translations into Latin of the complete works of Plato and important texts by Greek Neoplatonic authors, sparking an early modern revival of Platonic philosophy. Epicureanism also witnessed a revival of sorts, with the discovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum natura in 1417 and, soon after, the Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Stoicism was known to medieval readers through the work of Cicero, Se- REVIEWS 245 neca, and other Latin authors. Kraye’s essay concentrates on the significant number of Greek Stoic manuscripts, especially from the later period, recovered during the Renaissance, including foundational texts on practical ethics by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Renaissance scholars soon strove to integrate later Stoic philosophy with Christian doctrine. The Flemish philologist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) in his influential De Constantia of 1584 relied largely on Epictetus and Seneca to form the basis of a Christianized Stoic moral philosophy that became central to the seventeenth century Neo-Stoic movement and to prominent Christian-Stoic scholars such as the German controversialist Kaspar Schoppe (1576–1649). The Renaissance emphasis on Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius would, however, reverse itself in the mid-eighteenth century, when late Stoicism “came to be regarded as the derivative aftermath of early Stoicism,” a development Kraye intends to examine in a future study. By ushering the reader through the discoveries, interpretations, and growing influence of Stoic texts during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Kraye...