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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article explores the differences between their two interpretations from a biographical perspective, making use of their unpublished correspondence.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.

This article calls into question the claim of modern republicans that the republican writers of the Italian Renaissance promoted a 'non-domination' concept of political liberty, and thus can be regarded as forerunners and models for modern or neo-republicanism.

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.