Description: James Hankins challenges the view that the Renaissance was the seedbed of modern republicanism, with Machiavelli as exemplary thinker. What most concerned Renaissance political theorists, Hankins contends, was not reforming laws but shaping citizens. To secure the social good, they fostered virtue through a new program of education: the humanities.
Brief description: James Hankins is Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and founding General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He is the author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, winner of the Marraro Prize and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year; Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena; and Plato in the Italian Renaissance; and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy. Widely regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on Renaissance philosophy and political thought, he is a Corresponding Member of the British Academy.
Review Quotes: [The] magnum opus of a consummate intellectual historian. James Hankins is the living authority on Italian fifteenth-century neo-Latin literature...Hankins understands that by breathing new life into a beleaguered Renaissance movement, one can also come to the rescue of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritages, now under fire, on which the Renaissance drew, in order to understand the currently debated legacy of Western modernity. Inviting readers into the midst of an ongoing fray, Virtue Politics reminds us that we all have high stakes in this game.--Rocco Rubini "European Legacy"