The Northern Crusades came to an end not with the formal conversion of Lithuania but with the victory of Poland and Lithuania over the Teutonic Knights at the battle of Grunwald in 1410. This victory made possible the conversion of Samogitia and, by the 1440s, the final neutralisation of paganism as a political force in the Baltic. However, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople intensified curiosity about non-Christian religions and peoples from beyond the edges of Christendom and coincided with the rise of a new humanist ethnography grounded in curiosity about human nature as well as a desire to convert people to Christianity. This chapter examines the responses of the fifteenth-century humanist project to the apparent survival of pockets of pre-Christian religion from Vilnius to Tenerife, paying attention to the ways in which this discourse anticipated debates that would follow European voyages to the New World. The chapter considers the unique contribution of Pawel Wlodkowic in arguing for the rights of unchristianised peoples and assesses the reliability of humanist ethnographies as a source for pre-Christian religions. The chapter argues that ‘mere Christianisation’, a surface identification with Christianity, was often enough in this period for a region to be assimilated to Christendom.

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.

The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

Through patronage of art, architecture, and classical scholarship and through development of classically inspired rhetoric and ceremonies, the popes of the medieval and early modern periods promoted the recovery and reinterpretation of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Critics (including Roman civic leaders, Renaissance humanists, and Protestant reformers) pilloried the papal court as a symbol of corruption and cultural stagnation, but pontiffs and their advisers continued to adapt ancient and early Christian precedents to support their traditional claims to authority and to justify their new initiatives. This chapter argues that the papacy played a vital role in recovering and using the classical legacy throughout the (long) Middle Ages. It also argues that the venues and motivations for this appropriation remained more consistent than standard periodization of the medieval, Renaissance, and Counter Reformation papacy has suggested.

Throughout his life, Johnson’s heroes were the humanist scholars – Erasmus, Roger Ascham, and above all Joseph Scaliger – who had pioneered the close textual analysis of classical texts. Unlike Swift and Pope, Johnson was not satirical about true scholarship, and he produced two major feats of scholarship in their own right: The Dictionary of the English Language and The Plays of William Shakespeare. The Dictionary’s innovation was that, following the example of the humanist lexicographers of Latin, it was compiled by reading books and recording their use of English words. The book’s most striking feature is its more than 100,000 quotations; its weakest is Johnson’s etymologies. Compiling it helped to Johnson to cement his close knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, and so to edit them – sometimes proposing imaginative emendations, but with the caution his humanist exemplars recommended. Some of his comments, meanwhile, amount to moralistic mini-essays.

Although no direct claim for the autonomy of spheres was advanced in the scholastic speculations discussed in Chapter 5, such notions would be put forward in the circles where humanism and the artistic renewal pursued in contact with it emerged in Renaissance Italy. A powerful example was Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that what caused art and architecture to decline from its ancient heights was the substitution of religious values for aesthetic ones by Christianity as it became established under the Roman Empire. This defense of aesthetic autonomy would become more general and explicit as the expansion of the audience for painting and sculpture and the display of art objects in locations specifically dedicated to them – museums and galleries instead of churches or princely and noble residences – confronted viewers with “art as such,” and it would be theorized in Kant’s aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, which removed both religious and social value from judgments about art. But this development was singularly European. No similar move toward attributing autonomy to the aesthetic sphere would take place in India, China, or Muslim territories, despite the many beautiful objects produced in all of them and the exalted position attributed to artists in some.

The second chapter places Walter Pater, the widely acknowledged founder of British aestheticism, in conversation with mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford in order to illuminate the overlapping development of aestheticism and evolutionism in the 1860s and 1870s. Around the same time that Pater made the case for “art for art’s sake,” Clifford laid out a sweeping secular humanism that reaffirmed an anthropocentric and pseudo-religious view of the cosmos. Clifford’s optimistic reinterpretation of evolutionary science, this chapter argues, reinforced and drew on Pater’s contemporary conception of the aesthetic temperament: a discriminating, tasteful personality capable of transforming, in Pater’s words, the “ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe” into the “delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the work of Mathilde Blind, who synthesized Clifford’s and Pater’s ideas in a poetic oeuvre that sought to inculcate readers into reverent ways of experiencing an otherwise atheistic world.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Darwinian selection theory was linked to genetics, providing it with a secure foundation, although wider dissemination of this initiative was limited until the 1940s. Historians note that the ‘evolutionary synthesis’ was a rhetorical device to create an impression of unity, leaving the various disciplines involved still functioning independently. Radio now became an important means of disseminating science news, as in the 1959 celebrations of the centenary of the Origin of Species. The new version of Darwinism eroded the plausibility of eugenics and race theory, although these ideologies remained active in less visible forms. Popular accounts of evolutionism now stressed its open-endedness and played down the old assumption that humanity must be the inevitable outcome of progress. Julian Huxley tried to give the synthesis a moral dimension by linking it to his philosophy of humanism, but creationists saw the new initiative in science as a continuation of Darwinian materialism and renewed their attacks.

This chapter traces the publication history and animating ideas of Luciani Opuscula, a set of translations of Lucian begun as a collaboration between Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. I examine the volume’s contents, which grew over time as Erasmus kept adding to them, and the letters with which both translators prefaced their own selections, explaining to fellow humanists how the works are to be read. These interpretive letters tell us much about how the two great northern humanists understood Lucian and what role he played in their own evolution as the foremost ‘Lucianists’ of their age.

George Eliot and Mary Ward explicitly reject orthodox Christianity and hold a prominent place in standard accounts of Victorian doubt. However, their professed unbelief and yet simultaneous interest in liturgy reveals once again the problem with excarnated accounts of religion. To reduce religion merely to interior belief is to miss how Eliot and Ward use ritual forms to embody their post-Christian ethics. In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Jewish ritual galvanizes Daniel’s own ethical aspirations, and Christian liturgy frames key scenes in Gwendolen Harleth’s moral progress. Similarly, the protagonist of Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) is more than just a moral exemplar who imitates a purely human Jesus by working for social justice. Rather, he founds a new religion with its own liturgical forms, some of them borrowed directly from traditional liturgies. Thus, even the unorthodox Eliot and Ward feel the threat of excarnation and the attraction of ritual.

This chapter challenges historiographical claims that the theatre created before the seventeenth century was a mere prelude to the symphony of the neoclassical age. French-language plays written between 1550 and 1600 under the aegis of the Pléiade poets, who were charged with renewing the French language by looking back to classical Greek and Roman writings, form the focus of their study. Despite their classical credentials, these plays are best understood not by categorizing them as ‘humanist’, but instead by ‘situating’ them within the history within which they were written: the denominational split brought about by the Protestant Reformation of Christianity in Europe, which provoked a seismic upheaval and called into question representation on social, political and even cosmological levels. Whether Protestant or Catholic, explicitly militant or seemingly apolitical, literal or analogical, these plays were inevitably affected by this crisis, otherwise known as the Wars of Religion. Bouteille and Karsenti conclude that by returning to classical antiquity, Renaissance playwrights sought as much to garland their work with greater prestige as to innovate devices capable of recounting their anguished, conflicted and traumatic world.

Childhood is a critical period in terms of growth and development regarding cognition, language, social, emotional, and physical competence. This takes place within the context of different and varying social environments, which can impact on children’s learning and understandings of the worlds in which they live and how they fit into them. Childhood is a critical period in terms of addressing issues of discrimination and inequality that exist in society — discrimination that children and their families from minority cultures, and from other points of difference, can encounter, including in educational contexts. However, it is also a critical time in which to address the discrimination that children perpetuate in their daily interactions with others. Research shows that children are aware of and participate in, for example, racial, gendered, classed and (dis)ablist based discriminatory practices early, perpetuating the power relations that exist in the broader society around difference. However, much of this practice can go unnoticed or rationalised by adults through discourses of childhood, child development, and childhood innocence.

While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

This chapter explores how Black writers link the subjects of racial inequality and what it means to be human. This linking prompts a perennial question for critics and students alike: when it comes to examining African American literature’s long memory, do we examine the history of racial inequality to find out more about what it means to be human, or do we look to rich humanistic social relations in fiction to reimagine and/or resolve any remaining concepts of racial inequality? For this chapter, I examine the terms of the debates over how to represent Black humanity, and I claim that the debate has produced only ongoing and unanswered questions. Hence, I posit that it is in fact the irresolvable human conflict that asks and re-asks questions about Black humanity, and I claim that it is this ongoing instability or tension that defines race’s seminal role in African American literature.