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The special friendship of Martin Delrio and Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), the famous neo-Stoic philosopher and humanist, was much trumpeted by their Catholic contemporaries, who used it as proof of Lipsius’s religious orthodoxy. Protestants later depicted their friendship as proof of the humanist’s weakness and submission instead. This chapter studies the letters the two men exchanged in the aftermath of Lipsius’s return to the Southern Netherlands in 1591. It argues that the initiative came from Lipsius, not Delrio. Lipsius was an active agent, who designated Delrio as his mentor, but who by no means let himself be guided. Instead, his friendship with Delrio provided Lipsius with a public platform on which to re-enact his reconciliation with Catholicism. While Lipsius is the protagonist of this chapter, his return to Catholicism has a notable impact on Delrio as well.

The authorship of the Senecan tragedies was hotly debated until the end of the sixteenth century. Martial’s testimony regarding the existence of two Senecas confused the early Italian humanists and led to the creation of a fictitious Seneca tragicus. Martin Delrio proved instrumental in solving this problem in the late sixteenth century. This chapter shows how his achievement should be understood as part of a dialogue with his friend Justus Lipsius. Delrio built on the scholarship of his friend but also refuted some of his conclusions. The chapter suggests that Delrio showed himself to be Lipsius’s guide, but that the humanist never accepted his friend’s logic.

Humanists employed a simplified moral language of virtue and vice to describe their textual emendations. An emendation could be cast as an act of healing or, when deemed unsuccessful, as inflicting new wounds. This chapter argues that the Counter-Reformation should be seen as a textual project, which sought to codify Catholic tradition and liturgy. Within this context, it explores how Catholic scholars employed this moral language and divided emendation as grounded, positively, in the authority of the manuscript tradition or, negatively, in private reason. The latter was frequently understood as an act of divination. This chapter explores how Delrio used this language to correct not only the text of the Senecan tragedies, but his friend Lipsius as well.

This chapter forges a connection between Lipsius and Thomas Hobbes. There are a number of ways in which Hobbes's theoretical project, culminating in the Leviathan of 1651, can be read as continuing to work with central themes from Lipsius's political thought. Both writers agreed with Augustine that the goal of political life was to secure an earthly peace, but they disagreed with the Augustinian tradition through their ‘politique’ defence of the subordination of religious concerns to those of politics. Both Hobbes and Lipsius were more or less sceptical with respect to traditional arguments about the value of republican freedom, and both defended an account of determinism in human affairs, whether Lipsius's ‘fate’ or Hobbes's materialist physics. More recently, a number of scholars have fleshed out some historical connections between Lipsius and Hobbes.

This chapter starts with a very concise discussion of how the different approaches to classical literature debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be traced back to the ancient world and the Middle Ages. The rest of the chapter demonstrates how scholars in the early eighteenth century reflected on the work of their predecessors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based on their own scholarly concerns. The first example is Pieter Burman (1668–1741) and his Sylloge epistolarum (1724–7), the edition of unpublished writings by the French critic Henri Valois (1603–76; edition published in 1740), and the edition of George Buchanan (1506–82), published in 1725. In the Sylloge, for example, Burman focuses on letters that show how eminent scholars thought about the correct reading of classical texts, while a ‘popularizer’ like Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) is criticized. Valois’s work was used as a starting point to reflect on what Burman and his nephew Pieter Burman the Younger (1713–78) saw as the downfall of French textual criticism. Finally, Burman’s own interest in the stylistic and rhetorical aspects of texts also allowed him to avoid involvement in politically sensitive matters, as was the case for Buchanan’s views in contemporary Scotland. The final example discussed in this chapter is the prefatory material written by Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) for the edition of Erasmus’ Opera omnia (1703–6), in which Le Clerc dwells on the relationship between the study of ancient literature and other academic disciplines such as philosophy and theology.

The oldest curriculum drafted for Leiden university in 1575 closely followed that outlined by Ramus himself 20 years earlier. But from 1582 onward, after the arrival in Leiden of the great humanist scholar, Justus Lipsius, modern textbooks were swept aside in favour of unmediated study of classical authors (section 2.ii). The extermination of Leiden’s Ramist tradition is personified in the figure of Rudolph Snellius. In Marburg before 1575, his teaching aroused such enthusiasm that his former students and colleagues spent years assembling his draft material into a nine-volume, 3,000-page encyclopaedia published in Frankfurt in 1596. In Leiden after 1582, however, his preferred teaching methods were proscribed and he languished for twenty years as an extraordinary professor of mathematics, belittled by his humanist colleagues, and publishing nothing under his own name (section 2.iv). As a consequence, Leiden and the other Dutch universities became net importers of philosophy textbooks for five decades, producing very few of their own and relying instead on the key figure of the central European post-Ramist tradition: Bartholomaeus Keckermann (section 2.ii). Throughout this entire period, Leiden—contrary to widely accepted myth—grew slowly, remained relatively small, and was marginal to international Reformed student travel, until the Twelve Years Truce in 1609 began a growth spurt accelerated by the Thirty Years War after 1618 (section 2.i).

In the wake of the upheavals of the 1560s, new ideas about strengthening the power of rulers began to emerge. The central concept was sovereignty, first brought to public attention by the French jurist and lawyer Jean Bodin. Bodin wanted to defend the sovereign against external and internal threats, anchoring its power in divine and natural law but also giving him (or it) considerable scope for discretion. This chapter explores the origins and implications of this new interest in sovereignty, showing how it focused attention on the power of the ruler in relation to other sources of authority, notably the Church and the conscience of individuals. At Rome, Cardinal Bellarmine argued for the limits of state authority and for the indirect power of the papacy over magistrates, but other Catholics took different approaches. In particular, Giovanni Botero’s The Reason of State offered an approach to statecraft in which Church and state worked together. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands Justus Lipsius wove together classical texts, especially Tacitus, offering a route to stability and unity in a time of conflict; he acknowledged that conventional morality was sometimes inappropriate for a statesman who would need to adapt to the times. In France, Michel de Montaigne’s ground-breaking Essays combined personal reflection with subtle commentary on the world around him, as he sought to preserve his own integrity and maintain stability within his local community.

Along with the revival of Platonism, Renaissance Europe saw a surprising proliferation of writings on the world soul, shaping one of the most impressive eras in the history of this perennial theme. The current chapter focuses on key figures such as Marsilio Ficino, Agostino Steuco, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and Justus Lipsius. Presenting their major arguments, it shows the features of their interpretations and eventual interconnections. Starting from fifteenth-century Florence, it examines some important attempts to reconcile the doctrine of the world soul with Christianity. More than 100 years later, these attempts culminated in the work that revived Stoicism with a strong Platonic flavor. A clue to understanding all this evolution is the belief in “ancient theology” (prisca theologia) promoted by Ficino and developed in the stream of Renaissance Platonism.

The final chapter of this study analyses Sor Juana’s most perplexing auto, El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo. It argues that the key to understanding the play lies in its engagement with Neostoic writings on constancy. Thus, the play can be seen to present Hermenegild as the ideal Lipsian prince who develops this virtue until he rejects all worldly power and accepts his martyrdom. However, a careful examination of the treatment of sensory perception in the play, in particular its use of optical devices, demonstrates how Sor Juana sought to reconcile this promotion of Neostoic morality with a tempered epistemological optimism. Furthermore, an examination of the loa and its connection to the Carta atenagórica and the Respuesta sheds further light on the relationship between this play and the New Philosophy, and Sor Juana’s defence of her own participation in this circulation of new ideas.

This chapter shows that Ben Jonson’s practice in imitating classical poetry was far more deeply indebted to the kinds of ‘formal’ imitation described in Chapter 6 than Jonson himself would have wished to admit. The epigrams of Martial in particular were not in a simple sense ‘sources’ of material for Jonson’s poetry: rather he sought to imitate the rhetorical figurations and manner of Martial and other authors. The chapter argues Jonson’s own (highly derivative) remarks on imitation in the Discoveries should not be simply taken as guides to his practice. It argues for strong affinities between Jonson’s work as a translator and his practice as an imitator. As both an imitator and as a translator Jonson responded not just to the vocabulary and sense of his originals but also to what Cicero in De Optimo Genere Oratorum had termed their ‘figura’, or rhetorical shape. The chapter concludes by showing how Jonson’s mode of ‘formal’ imitation enabled him to create a style which subsequent imitators—both of his works and of classical poetry—could imitate, and how Thomas Randolph, Robert Herrick, and others imitated Jonson’s style and practice.

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).

Based on a survey of how the tropes of community, commerce, and communication pervaded the rhetoric of political theory and also of certain forms of prose fiction, Chapter 5 suggests a new approach to some of the agents and networks that wove the early modern international community. It focuses in particular on works written or translated by Edward Hoby, James Mabbe, Bernardino de Mendoza, and Justus Lipsius. Its approach to these works, which is founded upon a communicative (and not merely linguistic) turn, reveals the existence of diplomatic third spaces in which ritual, symbolic, or written conventions and semantics converged, despite particular oppositions and differences. Translation, for instance, was used both to consolidate diplomatic alliances and for competitive, international self-fashioning. Translations of political treatises were communicative strategies within the general pragmatics of self-representation—and even more so in an international context dominated by conflict. Literary translation both created diplomatic communities and formed a means of articulating difference within and between those communities. As tokens of exchange between different communities, the texts that this chapter surveys helped to build up symbolic capital for self-representation vis-à-vis the originals whose materials they were appropriating, constructing a common identity (political, religious, linguistic, or otherwise) that relied on the dialectical confrontation with an ‘other’.

Chapter 4 challenges established interpretations of Cowley as a (crypto-)royalist with a revisionist reading of his Poems (1656), particularly the Pindarique Odes and Davideis, as his conscious attempt to shape a poetic identity in Cromwellian England. These texts can be shown to draw on absolutist and defactoist arguments for obeying the Protectorate. The chapter considers Cowley’s complex engagement with Hobbes, tempered by his cautious scepticism, and his more traditionally absolutist concern with the moral constraints that distinguish legitimate sovereignty from tyranny. Cowley shares with Davenant an interest in the artificial nature of sovereignty, and the psychological drivers of conflict between humans. But his high view of absolute obedience is deeply shaped by a neostoic emphasis on concepts of apatheia and constancy, scepticism and self-preservation.