Scholasticism in Early Modern Theories of Literature and Art

Offers fresh and groundbreaking perspectives on the connections between scholasticism and the artistic and literary fields during the early modern period

Contrary to what is commonly assumed, early modern thought on literature and art, as developed in the vast quantity of treatises, commentaries, and other texts that were produced in the fields of poetics, rhetoric, symbolism, emblematics, and art theory, was no stranger to scholastic philosophy. Most early modern universities included scholastic philosophy as a significant element of the curriculum. Scholasticism, therefore, provided a common intellectual framework for a systematic rational discourse on literature and the visual arts. This collected volume aims to examine such borrowings and influences, and to illustrate them with concrete case studies, exploring mainly French, Italian, and Neo-Latin writings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It thus offers fresh and groundbreaking perspectives on the connections between scholasticism and the artistic and literary fields during the early modern period.