Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c.1350–c.1650 ed. by David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer (review)

In this volume, the editors and contributors affirm the importance of moral philosophy as a serious discipline in the Renaissance, inherently rejecting Cartesian claims that, because of the rhetorical methodologies employed by humanists, Renaissance philosophy is a misnomer. David Lines’s informative introduction and his articles in the collection focus on the uninterrupted use, from the medieval period to the Renaissance, of Aristotle’s Ethics as the foundational text for the study of moral philosophy in Europe. The contributions in the volume support his view that the commentary tradition existed well into the sixteenth century alongside innovations in methodology, sources, and genre in the teaching of ethics from the age of Petrarch to the mid-seventeenth century. The field of Renaissance ethics is so rich and complex, he claims, because the influx of Platonic, Ciceronian, Stoic, Epicurean, and newly discovered Aristotelian sources was met with attempts to reconcile these various strands of thought with existing Aristotelian commentary, Christian doctrine, and the Bible. In her epilogue, co-editor Sabrina Ebbersmeyer focuses on the displacement of Renaissance ethics in the seventeenth century by the new grounding of moral philosophy on reason, and by the preoccupation with human self-preservation as opposed to the cultivation of personal virtue.

The collection is divided into three parts, namely, Contexts, Approaches and Genres, and Themes. In the first part, David Lines and Jill Kraye summarize the sources available from 1350 to 1650 for the study of ethics. In addition to a study of Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici, they also include analyses of English Aristotelian John Case, Justus Lipsius’s interpretation of Stoic ethics, and Francisco de Quevedo’s reading of Stoic and Epicurean moral thought. These are refreshing and novel contributions in a field that has tended to concentrate on Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism in the Italian context. The second paper, also by David Lines, provides a survey of how and where moral philosophy was taught and discussed throughout Europe, including schools, universities, religious studia (especially of the Dominican order), humanist circles, academies, and courts. He makes the important point that the teaching of ethics became accessible to a much broader audience because of the new appearance of vernacular texts on the topic of ethics and the emergence of new and popular genres for ethical instruction, including dialogues, poems, and essays. Risto Saarinen’s article concentrates on ethics in the sixteenth century European Reformations, and provides clear analyses of both the Lutheran and Calvinist contexts. He makes the point that while the former concentrates on doctrine and theory, the latter focuses on the practice of ethical living.

The second part of the collection includes an important paper by Eckhard Kessler in which he identifies two distinguishing features of Renaissance moral philosophy that set it apart from medieval approaches to the discipline. The first is the new awareness of the contingency involved in making moral judgments. The second is the self-conscious reliance on rhetorical methods that the humanists used to deliberate on these issues. Luca Bianchi, in contrast, argues that the commentary tradition survived well into the sixteenth century. He also acknowledges the co-mingling of different strands of thought and the gradual mutation of the traditional forms of commentary into a much looser and more accessible formats that could be composed in vernacular instead of Latin, and that often include references to literature, poetry, the visual arts, history, contemporary affairs, the New World, and autobiographical details. This is a fitting segue to Ann Moss’ article about the proliferation of the printed commonplace book in the sixteenth century, and its status as a new and widely accessible genre for moral instruction. These handbooks blended short, easily referenced quotes from philosophy, poetry, and the Bible. She also discusses the genesis of the emblem book and its blending of text with image as an enhanced means of communicating on ethical...