Arguably the greatest Renaissance scholar of the great generation of йmigrйs to America that included Baron, Panofsky and Krautheimer, Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999) revolutionized Renaissance studies and significantly influenced three generations of students, scholars, and general readers through his teaching, lecturing, research and writing. In numerous articles and books he put forward a radically different — and focused — interpretation of Renaissance humanism and its relation to intellectual and cultural life. His training in Weimar Germany hardly suggested such a career path, as Kristeller studied phenomenology and existentialism with Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger, philology under Eduard Norden and Werner Jaeger, and made his first mark with a study of Plotinus, the founder of ancient Neo-Platonism, under Ernst Hoffman. But the rise of Nazism and his consequent flight to Italy and then to America changed Kristeller’s view toward scholarship and its contexts in profound ways that are still being debated. Kristeller Reconsidered finally takes the measure of this scholarly and geographical voyage from cutting-edge German philosophy and classical studies to breathtakingly innovative and substantive interpretations of the Renaissance. Sixteen leading scholars examine Kristeller’s life and thought to uncover the relationship between the man and the historical and philosophical movement he defined. They include Michael J.B. Allen, Paul Richard Blum, Warren Boutcher, Christopher S. Celenza, Arthur Field, Paul F. Grendler, James Hankins, Margaret L. King, Patricia H. Labalme, Angelo Mazzocco, John Monfasani, James J. Murphy, Martin L. Pine, Frederick Purnell, Jr., John Tedeschi, Ronald G. Witt. This collection offers fresh insights at a time when the humanist tradition itself and its influence on American culture is at a crucial turning point.
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