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The edition of Augustine’s City of God by the Spanish-born humanist Juan Luis Vives (first published in 1522) is one of most successful pieces of patristic scholarship of the sixteenth century. Produced just before the explosive escalation of the Reformation, it remained the key version of the text for over a hundred years. This article analyses the presentation of patristic knowledge in Vives’ commentary to explore how the confessional conflicts affected patristic scholarship. It argues that Vives’ work survived the confessional pressures relatively unscathed because it made Augustine’s work manageable and accessible across confessional parties. In doing so it seeks to highlight the importance of confessional silence in the Republic of Letters as a strategy to confront the pressures of confessionalisation.

This chapter examines Erasmus's edition of Augustine's collected works (Basel 1528–9) to illuminate the interaction between humanist scholarship and the Reformation. The most widely disseminated version of Augustine in the sixteenth century, Erasmus's edition offered not just a thorough critical revision of the Augustinian canon, but also some surprisingly open reservations about the church father's works. This chapter explores the editorial guidance of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives, the commentator of the City of God. It argues that Erasmus's humanist perspective on textual criticism and his theological agenda guided—and at times misguided—his editorial practice, such as in the assessment of authenticity. The result was an edition in which Augustine's works were framed by a highly ideological textual apparatus, which proved especially controversial in post-Tridentine Catholic circles.

This chapter examines aspects of the early modern reception of the Major Declamations. The pseudo-Quintilianic declamations were part of the Renaissance rhetorical curriculum, often included with early printings of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. This chapter discusses the responses to “The Bloodstained Wall” (DM 1) by the Renaissance humanist Juan Luis Vives and the early eighteenth-century scholar Lorenzo Patarol. Both authors intervene in a long-running debate on the style and purpose of declamation. Appendix 1 provides a text and translation of Patarol’s Antilogia to “The Bloodstained Wall,” the first English translation of any part of Patarol’s work.

This chapter discusses letter-writing manuals and their respective authors. Latin letter-writing manuals were among the most printed renaissance works on rhetoric with about 900 editions of individual works published between 1460 and 1620. Two manuals in particular, Niccolò Perotti's (1430–1480) Rudimenta grammatices (1473), which gave a quarter of its space to letter-writing; and Erasmus's De conscribendis epistolis (1521), went through over 100 editions. Other authors discussed include Lorenzo Traversagni of Savona (1425–1503), Francesco Negro (b. 1452), Cristoph Hegendorff (1500–1540), Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), Georgius Macropedius (1487–1558), and Justus Lipsius (1547–1606).

This chapter first examines the peace advocacy of Erasmus, the great humanist of the early sixteenth century, and that of his fellow humanists such as Thomas More and Juan Luis Vives. It considers Machiavelli's war advocacy and how it stands in direct contrast to Erasmus. The chapter then moves on to the end of the century to reflect on Shakespeare's complex attitude towards war and peace. Of particular relevance is Henry V, a play which poses questions about Shakespeare's real attitude towards his subject, which have been a matter for debate ever since they were first raised by the essayist William Hazlitt in the early nineteenth century. Within three years, Shakespeare was staging Troilus and Cressida, a play whose unremitting cynicism towards war is more widely recognized.

The focus of the chapter is on the response by sixteenth-century natural philosophers in Spain to the problems arising from the perceived tension between natural philosophy and empirical study of nature. The chapter notes the emergence and popularity in Spain of natural theological tracts following the Natural Theology of Raymond Sebond, and through the works of Luis de Granada and Alejo Venegas. These natural theologies defined the overarching purpose for the study of nature as a conduit to understanding God. Attention moves next to a representative sample of those who advocated the study of nature from an empirical perspective: Juan Luis Vives, Oliva Sabuco, and Andrés García de Céspedes. Having set up the dialectic that resulted from these perspectives, the chapter surveys various natural philosophical systems presented as alternatives to Scholastic Aristotelianism, such as Francisco Suárez’s modifications to Aristotelian metaphysics, Sebastian Fox Morcillo’s Neoplatonism, and Francisco Sánchez’s skeptical critique of knowledge. The chapter concludes by recapitulating the differences between the Augustinian versus Thomist views on humanity’s ability to attain true knowledge of nature.

“H is for Humanism” considers that purportedly quintessential figure of humanity—the child. Not only was this figure (the focus of so much humanist concern and, consequently, pedagogy) not precisely human in the Renaissance, but more profoundly, the child demonstrates a quality we might call plasticity. Turning to the venerable trope of the mirror, this chapter discovers in a series of troubled mirror moments a cascade failure of intelligibility of the human focalized on the child who has the all-too human capacity to infinitely mirror others. Thus, in a range of texts, from Juan Luis Vives’s A Fable About Man to Will Rankin’s anti-theatrical screed A Mirrour for Monsters to William Shakespeare’s metatheatrical Hamlet, where a figure of man not only defies definition but seems to exist without positive attributes of his own, the frequently privative accounts of humanity in the Renaissance are indices of an interest in a kind of radical plasticity exemplified by the child.

This chapter discusses sixteenth-century writers and their contributions to renaissance rhetoric. Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) was the dominant figure of this period and he took a personal role in the reform of universities and attracted many direct followers. Melanchthon built his work around the connections between rhetoric and dialectic, insisting that effective writing required a thorough and coordinated knowledge of both subjects. Other authors covered by the chapter include Johann Caesarius of Julich (c, 1468–1550), Bartholomaeus Latomus (1485–1570), Johann Rivius (1500–1553), Georg Major (1502–1574), Erasmus Sarcerius (1501–1559), Johann Spangenberg (1484–1550), Lucas Lossius (1508–1582), Martin Crusius (1526–1607), and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540).

This chapter reflects on Hans Blumenberg's “Of Nonunderstanding: Glosses on Three Fables” (1984). The first fable is “The Pauper's Coin.” Blumenberg read this fable as a hint about how important it is for the poor man, too, to carry at least a small coin about him. The second is a lyric fable of Babrios from the second century, in which Zeus, Poseidon, and Athena engage in an art competition. Meanwhile, the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives recorded the fable of the peasant who killed a donkey because it swallowed the moon while drinking from a bucket, and because the world could sooner do without a donkey than without heaven's lamp. The chapter then considers the different ways that this fable can be read.