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In this 3-volume set of primary sources, Lionel Laborie and Ariel Hessayon bring together a wide range of vital sources for the study of prophecy in the early modern world. This meticulously edited collection includes rare material and fascinating manuscripts published in English for the first time. Volumes are organised geographically, each with its own introduction by a specialist. Together with their respective contributors, they show how prophecies circulated widely throughout this period at all levels of society. Indeed, they often emerged in times of crisis and were delivered as warnings as well as signals of hope. Moreover, they were constantly adapted and translated to suit ever changing contexts – including those for which they had not been originally intended.

Contributors include: Viktoria Franke, Monika Frohnapfel, William Gibson, Mayte Green, Marios Hatzopoulos, Jacqueline Hermann, Ariel Hessayon, Warren Johnston, Lionel Laborie, Adelisa Malena, Andreas Pečar, Martin Pjecha, Michael Riordan, Luís Filipe Silvério Lima, Damien Tricoire, Leslie Tuttle, and Kristine Wirts.
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The French mystic Jean-Joseph Surin (1600–65) was the chief exorcist during the infamous demonic possession in Loudun in 1634–37. During the exorcism, a demon entered Surin’s own soul, and the exorcist became demoniac. He spent the following eighteen years of his life mute and paralyzed. All the while his troubled mind conversed with God, and he composed hymns and poems that tried to comprehend his agony. Surin left detailed descriptions of the dramatic events that shaped his life and fascinated his fellow Jesuits. But Surin was also an author of spiritual texts, a spiritual director of souls, a poet, and a prolific correspondent. This volume is the first to offer English readers a comprehensive selection of Surin’s mystical writings.
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This is the first edition since its original publication of Daniel Heinsius’ Latin tragedy Auriacus, sive Libertas saucia (Orange, or Liberty Wounded, 1602), with an introduction, a parallel English translation, and a commentary. Centering on the assassination of William of Orange, one of the leaders of the Dutch Revolt against King Philip II of Spain, Auriacus was Heinsius’ history drama, with which he aimed to raise Dutch drama to the level of classical drama. Highly influential, the tragedy contributed to the construction of a national identity in the Low Countries and launched Heinsius’ long career as an internationally celebrated poet and professor at Leiden University.
A Critical Edition of Chrysopoeia and Other Alchemical Poems, with an Introduction, English Translation and Commentary
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In Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524) and Renaissance Alchemy, Matteo Soranzo offers the first in-depth study of the life and works of Augurello, Italian alchemist, poet and art connoisseur from the time of Giorgione. Analysed, annotated and translated into English for the first time, Augurello’s poetry reveals a unique blend of late medieval alchemical doctrines, Northern Italian antiquarianism and Marsilio Ficino’s Platonism, enriching conventional narratives of Renaissance humanism.
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As the University of Erfurt collapsed in the early 1520s, Hessus faced losing his livelihood. To cope, he imagined himself a shape-changing Proteus. Transforming first into a lawyer, then a physician, he finally became a teacher at the Nuremberg academy organized by Philip Melanchthon. Volume 5 traces this story via Hessus's poems of 1524-1528: "Some Rules for Preserving Good Health" (1524; 1531), with attached "Praise of Medicine" and two sets of epigrams; "Three Elegies" (1526), two praising the Nuremberg school and one attacking a criticaster; "Venus Triumphant" (1527), with poems on Joachim Camerarius’s wedding; "Against the Hypocrisy of the Monastic Habit" (1527), with four Psalm paraphrases; and "Seventeen Bucolic Idyls" (1528), updating the "Bucolicon" of 1509 and adding five idyls.
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Uberto Decembrio’s Four Books on the Commonwealth (De re publica libri IV, ca. 1420), edited and translated by Paolo Ponzù Donato, is one of the earliest examples of the reception of Plato’s Republic in the fifteenth century. The humanistic dialogue provides an illuminating insight into such themes as justice, the best government, the morals of the prince and citizen, education, and religion. Decembrio’s dialogue is dedicated to Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, the ‘worst enemy’ of Florence. Making use of literary and documentary sources, Ponzù Donato convincingly proves that Decembrio’s thought, which shares many points with the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni, belongs to the same world of Civic Humanism.
Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615) was a lawyer, royal official, man of letters, and historian. He represented the University of Paris in its 1565 suit to dislodge a Jesuit school from Paris. Despite royal support, the Jesuits remained in conflict with many institutions, which in 1595 led to their expulsion from much of the realm. With ever-increasing polemics, Pasquier continued to oppose the Jesuits. To further his aims, he published a dialog between a Jesuit (almost certainly Louis Richeome) and a lawyer (Pasquier himself). He called it the Jesuits’ Catechism (1602). Pasquier’s work did not stop the French king from welcoming the Jesuits back. However, Pasquier’s Catechism remained central to Jansenist and other anti-Jesuit agitation up to the Society’s 1773 suppression and beyond.
The Contemplacioun of Synnaris, by the Observant Franciscan William Touris, written c.1494 and evidently intended for King James IV of Scotland, is a significant and much copied work of Older Scots, although the earliest surviving witness is the English print by Wynkyn de Worde (1499).
The Contemplacioun was the very first work of Older Scots literature to be translated and to be printed. The poem’s seven sections comprise a course of meditations for Holy Week. Richard Fox, bishop of Durham, commissioned the English print, in which the stanzas were preceded by Latin sententiae, biblical, medieval and ancient. The work retained sufficient interest to re-emerge in separate versions in both Scotland (1568) and England (1578), drastically revised for Protestant readers.
Winner of the 2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Art History

Written by the poet-painter Karel van Mander, who finished it in June 1603, the Grondt der edel, vry schilderconst (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting) was the first systematic treatise on schilderconst (the art of painting / picturing) to be published in Dutch (Haarlem: Paschier van Wes[t]busch, 1604). This English-language edition of the Grondt, accompanied by an introductory monograph and a full critical apparatus, provides unprecedented access to Van Mander’s crucially important art treatise. The book sheds light on key terms and critical categories such as schilder, manier, uyt zijn selven doen, welstandt, leven and gheest, and wel schilderen, and both exemplifies and explicates the author’s distinctive views on the complementary forms and functions of history and landscape.
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The Latin Poems of Manilius Cabacius Rallus of Sparta presents the poetic oeuvre of a forgotten poet of Renaissance Rome. A Greek by birth, Manilius Cabacius Rallus (c. 1447–c. 1523) spent most of his life far from his motherland, unable to return. Through his poems, composed in a range of metres and genres, Rallus engaged with some major events and personalities of his time, including Angelo Poliziano, Ianus Lascaris, and Pope Leo X. His poems also reflect on timeless human experiences such as helplessness in the face of fortune and nostalgia for what is lost. Han Lamers edited the Latin text of Rallus’ poems (most of them printed for the last time in 1520) and added annotations and an English prose translation.