Books Received

Baker, Nicholas Scott and Brian Jeffrey Maxson, eds. After Civic Humanism: Learning and Politics in Renaissance Italy. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014. 297p., index, $34.95. Thirteen post–Hans Baron essays on the actual practice of Italian scholars and statesmen, 1300–1650.

Baker, Patrick. Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror. Ideas in Context, no. 114. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. ix, 335p., bibl., index, $120. How humanists understood themselves, perceived their own history, the goals they enunciated, and the accomplishments they celebrated. (Answer: Classical Latin eloquence as the guarantor of civilization.)

Benson, Hugh H. Clitophon’s Challenge: Dialectic in Plato’s Meno, Phaedo, and Republic. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. x, 318p., bibl., index, $65. Hypothesis as the method for discovering new knowledge.

Bianco, Giuseppe. Après Bergson: Portrait de groupe avec philosophe. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2015. ix, 377p., index. Bergson’s reception and the meaning of an “intellectual heritage” or a “school.”

Black, Jeremy. Clio’s Battles: Historiography in Practice. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 2015. xiii, 323p., bibl., index. The use and abuse of academic, public, and state history, especially in the second half of the twentieth century.

Bourke, Richard. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. xiii, 1,001p,. ill., index, $45. The British statesman (1730–97) as a philosopher-in-action.

Bronner, Simon J. Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2015. xiii, 530p., bibl., ill., index, $30. The Internet as a folk system and the praxis of American football show how old rituals and customs persist in the new.

Buys, Ruben. Sparks of Reason: Vernacular Rationalism in the Low Countries, 1550–1670. Hilversum, Netherlands: Verloren, 2015. 304p., bibl., ill., index. Classical philosophy, humanism, spiritualism, and popular piety merge in the lay philosophy of D. V. Coornhert, H. L. Spiegel, and others.

Carruthers, Mary. The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. xii, 233p., bibl., ill., index. The terminology employed by medieval people to evaluate their own aesthetic feelings.

Carter, Heath W. Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. xi, 277p., bibl., ill., index, $35. Bottom-up contests over wages and workday length forced “scab ministers” to assess the implications of Christianity for an industrializing society.

Coornhert, D. V. Ethics, or the Art of Living Well by Means of Knowledge of the Truth about Man, Sin, and Virtue. Ed. and trans., Gerrit Voogt. Hilversum, Netherlands, 2015. 502p., index. Sixteenth-century Dutch nonconformist emphasizes virtue and self-mastery in this world instead of redemption and salvation in the next.

Copenhaver, Brian P. Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. xiv, 600p., bibl., ill., index, $125. Ficino’s ancient and scholastic sources, hermeticism, and the poverty of erudition compared to the power of magic.

Cuttica, Cesare. Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the Patriotic Monarch: Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-Century Political Thought. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. x, 283p., bibl., index, $105. Patriarcha non Monarcha in the political and religious contexts of its composition in the 1620s–1630s and its publication in 1680.

Darnell, Regna, Michelle Hamilton, Robert L. A. Hancock, and Joshua Smith, eds. The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. xxvi, 381p., ill., index, $75. Fifteen essays introduce a project to digitize and edit the Franz Boas papers in a projected twenty-five volumes.

El-Rouayheb, Khaled. Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. xvi, 399p., bibl, index, $99. Kurdish and Persian rationalism, theologian-logicians in Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco, and Sufi mystical monism from Anatolia to India.

Garvía, Roberto. Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. viii, 226p., bibl., index, $55. The social movements behind three twentieth-century artificial languages: Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido.

Gehring, Ulrike and Peter Weibel, eds. Mapping Spaces: Networks of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Landscape Painting. Karlsruhe: Zentrum für Kunst und...