The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe

Now available in paperback for the first time, the volume covers a broad and fascinating scope of subjects presented by leading scholars. Anthony Grafton's contribution on the fifteenth-century forger Annius of Viterbo emphasizes the role of imagination in the classical revival; Lisa Jardine demonstrates the way in which Erasmus helped turn a technical and rebarbative book by Rudolph Agricola into a sixteenth-century success story; Alan Charles Kors finds the roots of Enlightenment atheism in the works of French Catholic theologians; Donald R. Kelley follows the legal idea of "custom" from its formulation by the ancients to its assimilation into the modern social sciences; and Lawrence Stone shows how changes in legal action against female adultery between 1670 and 1857 reflect basic shifts in English moral values.