In addition to extensive work in the archives of
Eugenio Garin (Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa), Giovanni Gentile (Rome), Hans Baron (Duke University), and Paul Oskar Kristellcr (Columbia University), Rubini--assistant professor of Italian Literature at the University of Chicago--engages in a deep reading of their representative texts: Garin's L 'umanesimo italiano (1952) and Cronache di filosofia italiana (1955); Gentile's Opere filoso fiche and Storia della filosofia italiana (both edited by Garin); Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1955); and the four volumes of Kristeller's Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (1956-1996).
Here the coverage moves to focus primarily on two outstanding Italian philosophers, Ernesto Grassi and
Eugenio Garin. Both felt that in the postwar period the problem was to restore faith in humanism by turning attention once again to its Renaissance origins.
As a student of
Eugenio Garin, Vasoli was one of the last links to the generation of Kristeller and his contemporaries, the generation that connects us back as far as Burckhardt in the historiography of the Renaissance.
Ya en el siglo XX, es obligado destacar a tres grandes autores, ya clasicos: Hans Baron (1900-1988), y su concepto de <<humanismo civico [12], Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999) y
Eugenio Garin (1909-2004); autores estos dos ultimos de largas vidas paralelas y dispares interpretaciones: Garin, mas proximo a una interpretacion amplia, de caracter historico-cultural [13]; Kristeller, a una interpretacion que podriamos llamar restringida, mas continuista con la Edad Media [14].
Nicola Abbagnano (1901-1990), the leading representative of secular or humanistic Italian Existentialism; Enrico Castelli (1900-1977), a prominent Catholic existentialist and cultural promoter;
Eugenio Garin (1909-2004), Italy's leading historian of Italian Renaissance and twentieth-century philosophy; and Ernesto Grassi (1902-1991), a onetime student of Heidegger and international spokesperson for the studia humanitatis, were all to some degree existentialists, Vichians, historians of philosophy, and invested in the philosophical merits of the Italian Renaissance--Quattrocento Humanism in particular.
Eugenio Garin in 1976 published a work that was translated into English as Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life.
Chapter two turns to the two historians who were the first to recognize the range and philosophical depth of that "lost Latin literature":
Eugenio Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller.
Law writes about the Renaissance prince; Michael Mallett the condottiere, Massimo Firpo on the cardinal; Peter Burke on the courtier;
Eugenio Garin on "the philosopher and the magus"; Alberto Tenenti on the merchant-banker; Andre Chastel on the artist; Margaret L.
Eugenio Garin, for example, wrote that "Filelfo always proposes to the powerful the same bargain: in exchange for writings in verse or prose, a certain number of zecchini, or florins, or ducats" ("L'opera di Francesco Filelfo," in Storia diMilano, vol.
He reviews, summarizes and refutes the body of work on scholarship on education, including the work of
Eugenio Garin, Paul Grendler, Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine and Robert Black.