Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) was a celebrated diplomat, historian, philosopher, and humanist scholar of the early Renaissance who mastered ancient Greek and Hebrew as well as classical Latin. In this treatise, dedicated to Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples, Manetti addresses a question central to the anthropology of the Renaissance: what are the moral, intellectual, and spiritual capabilities of the unique amalgam of body and soul that constitutes human nature? The treatise takes issue with a popular work of medieval asceticism, On the Misery of the Human Condition, written by none other than Innocent III, one of the greatest of medieval popes. The pope's diatribe expresses a revulsion against human nature and argues for the futility of ambition, the emptiness of pleasures, and the ultimate worthlessness of human achievements. Manetti's treatise presents a comprehensive refutation of the pope's pessimism, sometimes citing the achievements of the Renaissance as evidence for the potential divinity of human nature and its extraordinary capabilities. This edition contains the first complete translation into English.

Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) was a celebrated humanist orator, historian, philosopher, and scholar of the early Renaissance. Son of a wealthy Florentine merchant, he participated actively in the public life of the Florentine republic and embraced the new humanist scholarship of the quattrocento, oriented to the service of the state and the reform of religion. Mastering not only classical Latin but also Greek and Hebrew, he gained access to a whole library of sources previously unknown in the Latin West. Among the fruits of his studies is his treatise Against the Jews and the Gentiles, an apologia for Christianity in ten books that redefines religion in terms of "true piety," and relates the historical development of the pagan and Jewish religions to the life of Jesus. The present volume includes the first critical edition of Books I-IV, together with the first translation of those books into any modern language.

Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) was an Italian diplomat and a celebrated humanist orator and scholar of the early Renaissance. Son of a wealthy Florentine merchant, he turned away from a commercial career to take up scholarship under the guidance of the great civic humanist, Leonardo Bruni. Like Bruni he mastered both classical Latin and Greek, but, unusually, added to his linguistic armory a command of Biblical Hebrew as well. He used his knowledge of Hebrew to make a fresh translation of the Psalms into humanist Latin, a work that implicitly challenged the canonical Vulgate of St. Jerome. His Apologeticus (1455-59) in five books was a defense of the study of Hebrew and of the need for a new translation. As such, it constituted the most extensive treatise on the art of translation of the Renaissance. This ITRL edition contains the first complete translation of the work into English.

The Renaissance recovery of ancient biographical writers such as Plutarch, Suetonius, and Jerome led to a wave of imitations by Renaissance authors from Petrarch to Machiavelli. The orator, diplomat, and statesman Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459), an expert in Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, was among the leading humanist biographers of the Renaissance.

This collection brings together his famous biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which helped establish the canon of Italian literature, as well as his parallel lives of Socrates and Seneca, which remained the standard biographical sources for those philosophers throughout the early modern period. It also includes extended excerpts from two works, "On Famous Men of Great Age" and "Against the Jews and the Gentiles," which contain biographical entries on a range of Italian literary figures from Brunetto Latini and Guido Cavalcanti to Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni.