Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis [Paperback]

Professor Anthony Levi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 2004

This book presents a revisionist examination of the development of European intellectual culture between the high middle ages and 1550. It draws particular attention to the roles of Marsilio Ficino and Erasmus and analyses major aspects of the work of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, before moving on to Petrarch, Valla, Pico della Mirandola, the devotio moderna, More, Luther, Calvin and their contemporaries. It establishes radically new perspectives on the Renaissance and the Reformation, and on the continuity between them. Choice highlights the "prodigious and scholarly originality of this book," and comments that "the main thesis holds and Levi provides a rich historical context," while Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung notes "the huge picture of the cultural and social development of Europe" calling the book "one of the rare historical masterpieces in which intellectual clarity is combined with a fullness of nuance."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A refreshingly broad vision of the period." Times Literary Supplement; "It is an important work and sets forth new constructs about Renaissance and Reformation that must be considered." Marion Leathers Kuntz, American Historical Review; "Levi's skillfully navigated intellectual journey is a tour de force." Choice; "Massive and learned work... great wealth of Learning." History"

From the Back Cover

"It is an important work and sets forth new constructs about Renaissance and Reformation that must be considered."-Marion Leathers Kuntz, American Historical Review; "[Levi's] skillfully navigated intellectual journey is a tour de force."--Choice; "A refreshingly broad vision of the period."-Times Literary Supplement; "A massive and learned work . . . great wealth of learning."-History

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (May 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300103468
• ISBN-13: 978-0300103465
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,432,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars only for some, December 27, 2002

By 

maximusone "maximusone" (Brussels) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Renaissance & Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (Hardcover)

This is a book on a current topical subject. In the wake of 9/11 a number of writers have attributed the different attitudes in the Islamic world to secularism (and other issues) to the absence of a phenomenon in the Islamic world comparable to the Renaissance and Reformation. At the same time, others have argued that part of the roots of at least the renaissance lie in Andalus, i.e. Islamic Spain, where muslim philosophers like Averroes have helped to transfer Greek philosophy from the antiquity to the post-medieval age.

This book had been well received by critics (at least some I have read). However I found it to be an extremely detailed description (in chronological order) of innumerable events and actions of people involved in the genesis of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Although the author attempts to put both events in perspective, with an introduction on scholastic thought which had been dominant in the Christian West before the Reformation, I believe that it is certainly not an introduction to how Renaissance and Reformation have come about because it leaves many really big-picture questions unanswered. This book is excellent though for the reader who has had all those answers already and would like to know every discreet step of how this process unfolded.

To give you an idea of the author's style, here's one typical sentence :

"But Groote's spirituality also avoided the religious tensions imposed by Ockham's insistence on the potentially arbitrary nature of the decrees of a transcendent God, on the unicity of the divine act of foreknowledge and predestination which appeared to make effort otiose, and on the paradoxical and unsupported belief that God would nevertheless give grace to those who did whatever lay with them, while offering no means for individuals to ascertain their own spiritual state."

I suppose some will love it for its detail and quite a few others will hate it. I thought it was interesting, but hard work.