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James Hankins

James Hankins

James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the founder and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. His Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy has just been published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Six_Tuscan_Poets

How to Build Your Own Renaissance

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The historical parallels between fourteenth-century Europe and our own times can be useful in our current civilizational crisis. Petrarch aimed to create a new synthesis between classical and Christian civilization, to use the resources of antiquity to heal the spiritual diseases of his own time. What he and his followers created over the next century and a half is known to historians as the Renaissance, the rebirth of antiquity. It followed a formula that can still work today.
Books

Liberal Learning beyond Liberalism: The Humanities as Soulcraft in the Renaissance and Today

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Liberal justifications of liberal education are no longer effective. Teachers of humanities need a different way of defending the value of what we do and love. The Renaissance can teach us how to make a case for the study of old books that is compatible with the values of a pluralist society.

On Virtue Politics

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“Virtue politics” is modeled on the phrase “virtue ethics,” an approach to moral philosophy inspired by Aristotle and elaborated by the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. “Virtue politics” describes the central concerns of Renaissance political philosophy. Like the ancient Greeks, the Renaissance humanists had a richer understanding of what the state has to do in order to encourage virtue.
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