Scaling the Balkans puts in conversation several fields that have been traditionally treated as discrete: Balkan studies, Ottoman studies, East European studies, and Habsburg and Russian studies. By looking at the complex interrelationship between countries and regions, demonstrating how different perspectives and different methodological approaches inflect interpretations and conclusions, it insists on the heuristic value of scales. The volume is a collection of published and unpublished essays, dealing with issues of modernism, backwardness, historical legacy, balkanism, post-colonialism and orientalism, nationalism, identity and alterity, society-and nation-building, historical demography and social structure, socialism and communism in memory, and historiography.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was active during the Renaissance, developing adventurous ideas even while serving as a churchman. The religious issues with which he engaged – spiritual, apocalyptic and institutional – were to play out in the Reformation. These essays reflect the interests of Cusanus but also those of Gerald Christianson, who has studied church history, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The book places Nicholas into his times but also looks at his later reception. The first part addresses institutional issues, including Schism, conciliarism, indulgences and the possibility of dialogue with Muslims. The second treats theological and philosophical themes, including nominalism, time, faith, religious metaphor, and prediction of the end times.

Investigating the oeuvre of the Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), this collection is the first one to make extensive use of the critical editions of Filelfo’s numerous writings – in particular of his Epistolarium, published in 2016 by Jeroen De Keyser, who also edited this volume. Uncovering much new information not previously mentioned in the literature on Filelfo, twelve specialized scholars are drawing attention to long-neglected material, shedding new light on Filelfo’s intellectual endeavors and his literary journey between Greek and Latin, as a prominent protagonist on the scene of fifteenth-century Italy. This illuminating collection offers historians of ideas as well as literary scholars and Neo-Latinists new inroads into Filelfo’s vast oeuvre, and through it to the world of Quattrocento humanism. Contributors include: Jean-Louis Charlet, Guy Claessens, Jeroen De Keyser, Tom Deneire, Ide François, James Hankins, Noreen Humble, Gary Ianziti, Han Lamers, David Marsh, John Monfasani, and Jan Papy.

A Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism offers a comprehensive survey of the work of the Majorcan lay theologian and philosopher Ramon Llull (1232-1316) and of its influence in late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe, as well as in the Spanish colonies of the New World. Llull’s unique system of philosophy and theology, the “Great Universal Art,” was widely studied and admired from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. His evangelizing ideals and methods inspired centuries of Christian missionaries. His many writings in Catalan, his native vernacular, remain major monuments in the literary history of Catalonia. Contributors are: Roberta Albrecht, José Aragüéz Aldaz, Linda Báez Rubí, Josep Batalla, Pamela Beattie, Henry Berlin, John Dagenais, Mary Franklin-Brown, Alexander Ibarz, Annemarie C. Mayer, Rafael Ramis Barceló, Josep E. Rubio, and Gregory B. Stone.