Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror(English, Hardcover, Baker Patrick)

Know about the book -

Italian Renaissance Humanism in the Mirror(English, Hardcover, Baker Patrick) is written by Baker Patrick and published by Cambridge University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1107111862 (ISBN 10) and 9781107111868 (ISBN 13).

This important study takes a new approach to understanding Italian Renaissance humanism, based not on scholarly paradigms or philosophical concepts but on a neglected yet indispensable perspective: the humanists' understanding of themselves. Through a series of close textual studies, Patrick Baker excavates what humanists thought was important about humanism, how they viewed their own history, what goals they enunciated, what triumphs they celebrated - in short, he attempts to reconstruct humanist identity. What emerges is a small, coherent community dedicated primarily not to political ideology, a philosophy of man, an educational ethos, or moral improvement, but rather to the pursuit of classical Latin eloquence. Grasping the significance this stylistic ideal had for the humanists is essential to understanding both their sense of themselves and the importance they and others attached to their movement. For eloquence was no mere aesthetic affair but rather appeared to them as the guarantor of civilisation itself.