The Revolution in Writing Styles during the Renaissance
Just as we have our faces, we each should have own writing style – this was the lesson that two leading Renaissance thinkers, Erasmus and Montaigne, gave to their contemporaries in 16th century Europe.
‘Cast out into the hellish night’: Pagan Virtue and Pagan Poetics in Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate
Valla wrote about Epicureanism before the Renaissance rediscovery of classical Epicurean texts. Poggio Bracciolini had not yet circulated his newly-discovered manuscript of first century Epicurean philosopher Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and Valla wrote without access to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, which discussed Epicurus’ teachings in greater detail.
Ciceronian rhetoric and the art of medieval French hagiography
In the lives of the saints, it is clear that medieval hagiography reflects the statement, ‘Antiquity has a twofold life in the Middle Ages: reception and transformation.’