Suchergebnisse

While Jesuits composed more Latin didactic poetry than any other order or profession in the early modern period, they—perhaps surprisingly—rarely chose moral, political, or spiritual subjects for versification in this genre. One of the few exceptions to the rule is Prudentia, prolusio didascalica (Prudence, a didactic prolusion) by the Paduan-born Jesuit Giannantonio Bernardi (1670–1743), first published in Venice in 1709. Bernardi seems to have spent his whole life as a teacher, preacher, and confessor in northern Italy, apart from a stint accompanying his penitent, the Venetian envoy and future Doge, Carlo Ruzzini, to Constantinople. This paper sets Bernardi's didactic poem in the context of some other Jesuit didactic poems of moral or spiritual counsel, especially Pierre Mambrun's Psychourgicon: De cultura animi (La Flèche: ex officina Gervasii Laboe, 1661), as well as a selection of his other moral writings. It finds the Jesuit dimension to Bernardi's poem more in its literary and institutional contexts and paratexts than in the bare philosophical doctrine it relays.

Rudolph Agricola: Six Lives and Erasmus's Testimonies The Frisian humanist Rudolph Agricola (1443-1485) is rightly famous for single-handedly bringing the Italian Renaissance to the North. Owing to his fascinating personality and many talents, he attracted the love and admiration of his contemporaries and the following generations. As a result, six biographies on Agricola have been preserved. The authors of these lives drew their materials from different sources and wrote their texts independently from each other. Differing vastly in rhetorical aims and methods, they provide us with a vivid image of cultural and intellectual life in the 15th century. Erasmus praised Agricola's work throughout his writings. No less than fifty testimonies from Erasmus and his correspondents are presented here.
This edition of sources supplements the volume of Agricola's letters (BLN, 2002) and is preceded by an expert survey of all biographical information now at our disposal. Thus it fills a gap in our knowledge of a great man of letters, while correcting a number of persistent misconceptions (concerning the year of Agricola's birth, for instance).