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Hankins, James

Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller were the most important interpreters of Renaissance humanism in the half century following the Second World War. This article explores the differences between their two interpretations from a biographical perspective, making use of their unpublished correspondence. Key passages from their correspondence are published in an appendix.

Leonardo Bruni's aim in the De militia (ca. 1420) was to co-opt the most glamorous of medieval ideals, the ideal of chivalry, and to reinterpret it in terms of Greco-Roman ideals of military service. In so doing he aimed to make the reform of knighthood in Renaissance Florence into an aspect of the revival of antiquity.

It is argued that modern characterizations of republican liberty as adhering to a "non-domination" model of liberty are inaccurate for the period of the Italian Renaissance, and that the humanists of the period, aside from Machiavelli, did not see political liberty primarily as instrumental to the pursuit of private ends.