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From Venetian Visitor to Curial Humanist: The Development of Agostino Steuco's “Counter“-Reformation Thought*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
The study of Italian humanism in the age of the Reformation has focused almost exclusively on the relationship between humanism and the Italian Spirituali. This emphasis can be traced back to the many works of Delio Cantimori. Cantimori persistently argued that humanism, with its emphasis on scriptural studies, philology, and spiritual and ecclesiastical renewal promoted evangelical spirituality and church reform among Italians. He saw the Spirituali—many of whom were humanists—as pious, devout individuals caught between their own evangelical convictions and the traditions of a spiritually unsatisfying and morally corrupt ecclesiastical system. It was the dynamics of this spiritual crisis, fueled by the clash between evangelism and the doctrines of the church, that formed the basis of many of Cantimori's works on humanism and reform in Italy.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1994
Footnotes
Versions of this essay were presented in 1990 at the Renaissance Conference of Northern California at the University of California, Davis, and at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. I would like to thank Elisabeth Gleason, Gigliola Fragnito, Ken Gouwens, and Fred McGinness for reading earlier versions of this paper and offering useful criticisms. I also am indebted to the two anonymous Renaissance Quarterly readers for their helpful suggestions.
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