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The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

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The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism provides readers with a useful collection of essays that discuss humanism from its origins in late medieval Italy up to its impact upon the literature of Elizabethan England. In essence, this is a remarkable and insightful compendium on Italian humanism; and it will be supremely beneficial to impressionistic students and accomplished scholars alike. The only fault to this volume is that it does not sufficiently handle northern humanism. True, it rightfully pays a particular respect to the grandiose surge of English poetry during the 16th-17th centuries. However, everyone knows that Northern Humanism was a far greater phenomenon than that, for it was a movement that touched every facet of European society and then molded it. So it is sad to say that these essays only offer minimal lip-service to northern enthusiasts like Erasmus, More, Colet, Melanchton, Rhenanus and Estiene, whose vision of humanitas was just as clear as Pico's, Petrarch's, or Valla's. Regardless of this, it may be estimated that the chairman, the committee and the worthy scholars who wrote, edited, and compiled these essays had viable reasons for leaving much of northern Europe's role in humanism untold, as it is a subject in itself that calls for a complete volume of its own.