The last comprehensive biography on Francesco Filelfo was written well over one hundred and fifty years ago. Since then the general state of knowledge about this humanist has been largely conditioned by G. Voigt's hostile assessment and G. Bendaucci's unsystematic and unreliable studies. Monographs on Filelfo's stay at Florence and Siena have been provided by G. Zippel and L. de Feo Corso, but the chief period in Filelfo's life, i.e. Filelfo at the court of Milan, has so far not been studied in adequate depth. E. Garin's recent account of Filelfo at Milan does not open up any new vistas. Yet Milan was the city where Filelfo spent half his life, where he wrote almost all his works and where he left a deep imprint in the development of humanistic culture. This thesis is therefore intended to fill this gap. The recent publication of P.O. Kristeller's 'Iter Italicum' made it possible to base such a reappraisal on an extensive survey of Filelfo manuscripts in Italian libraries. Almost all the existing Filelfo manuscripts at Rome, Florence, Milan, Pisa, Lucca, Bergamo, Venice, Munich, Oxford, Holkham Hall and London have been examined for this thesis. All unpublished material found there had to be copied and editions had to be prepared. Only Vienna, Paris and Wolfenbüttel seem to hold still unknown works. Particularly in the archives of Florence and Milan a large amount of entirely new material has been discovered which is being edited for the first time in the appendix of this thesis. It throws a significant light on Filelfo's social and economic situation. It allows us to penetrate the curtain of rhetorical declamations of Filelfo's letters and to understand the economic and cultural reality that lay behind them. Another purpose of this thesis consisted in the compilation of a bibliography in which all the various publications on Filelfo since about 1870 are listed, for they are scattered in periodicals and sometimes difficult to trace. [Continued in text ...]

Historians have traditionally viewed the controversy between the ancients and moderns within the narrow scope of the title. However, in the seventeenth century the issue of learning and knowledge was a significant issue in the controversy. By 1600, the humanists were well established in the universities and applied the classical world view as an ideal for life. The humanists' emphasis on the classic world view along with their compatibility with scientific investigation strengthened their influence in university learning, which lasted until the mid-seventeenth century. From the 1640s onward, several groups explicitly criticized the prominence of humanist ideals in the universities. The sense of these criticisms and the humanists' responses indicate that the issue was not simply ancient against modern, but one world view against another. During the Civil War and Interregnum, radical puritans censured the use of human learning in the universities and alerted the humanists to future attacks on their domination of learning. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the new philosophy emerged as a strong force in the quest for knowledge. The new philosophers' vitality encouraged them to denounce human learning and propose the subordination of human learning to the ever-advancing new philosophy. As a result, the humanists staunchly defended traditional learning and their standing in the universities. This thesis re-examines the ancient and modern controversy during the seventeenth century and views it as a continuing debate over which knowledge would best benefit English society. In this way, historians can better understand the motivations for humanists to the reactions of the humanists to the scientists. / Master of Arts

Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716) was banished from Holland in 1679. Why did this humanist scholar get into so much trouble in the most tolerant part of Europe in the seventeenth century? In an attempt to answer this question, this thesis places Beverland's writings on sex, sin, Scripture, and scholarship in their historical context for the first time. Beverland argued that lust was the original sin and highlighted the importance of sex in human nature, ancient history, and his own society. His works were characterized by his erudite Latin, satirical style, and disregard for traditional genres and hierarchies in early modern scholarship. Dutch theologians disliked his theology and exegesis, and hated his use of erudition to mock their learning, morality, and authority. Beverland's humanist colleagues did not support his studies either, because they believed that drawing attention to the sexual side of the classics threatened the basis of the humanist enterprise. When theologians asked for his arrest and humanist professors left him to his fate, Dutch magistrates were happy to convict Beverland because he had insolently accused the political and economic, as well as the religious and intellectual elite of the Dutch Republic, of hypocrisy. By restricting sex to marriage, in compliance with Reformed doctrine, secular authorities upheld a sexual morality that was unattainable, Beverland argued. He proposed honest discussion of the problem of sex and suggested that greater sexual liberty for the male elite might be the solution. Beverland's crime was to expose the gap between principle and practice in sexual relations in Dutch society, highlighting the hypocrisy of a deeply conflicted elite at a precarious time. His intervention came at the moment when the uneasy balance struck between Reformed orthodoxy, humanist scholarship, economic prosperity, and patrician politics, which had characterized the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, was disintegrating, with unsettling consequences for all concerned. Placing Beverland's fate in this context of change provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual environment of the Republic in the last decades of the seventeenth century.