Justus Lipsius Research Articles

SENECA, DE BENEFICIIS 6.19.5—A NEGLECTED TEXT ON ROMAN PUBLIC LAW

si quis patriae meae pecuniam credat, non dicam me illius debitorem nec hoc aes alienum profitebor aut candidatus aut reus: ad exsoluendum tamen hoc dabo portionem meam.If anyone were to lend money to my country, I will not call myself his debtor nor will I declare this as money owed either when a candidate or when prosecuted: nevertheless, I will contribute my share to paying off the debt. Miriam Griffin drew attention to the comment of Justus Lipsius: ‘a defendant might have to make such a declaration in cases involving financial penalties, such as extortion and peculation, for when the litis aestimatio [‘assessment of damages’] was made, it would be important to know who the other claimants to the convicted man's assets were, and how encumbered his property was.’ No further elucidation, however, has been made since Lipsius. Mommsen failed to record this passage in his Staatsrecht and Strafrecht, and, as far as we know, no monograph on Roman criminal law mentions the passage of Seneca.

Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism: The De bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius, written by Thomas Hendrickson

Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism: The De bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius, written by Thomas Hendrickson

“[P]lain and passive fortitude”: Stoicism and Spaces of Dissent in Sejanus

In Ben Jonson's Sejanus, performed at court in the first year of King James’ reign in 1603, Arruntius seemingly figures as “Jonson's spokesperson.” While lauding the moral responsibility of Arruntius, some critics have portrayed the Senator as a passive Stoic whose “only outlet is speech.” For a poet who emphasizes the moral and didactic responsibility of authorship, why, then, does his spokesman inhabit a peripheral space in criticism? Critical interpretation of Arruntius depends on the editorial decision to render many of Arruntius’ lines as asides or as public critique, and this editorial crux is examined vis-à-vis early modern attitudes toward public engagement. I argue that the play negotiates the tensions between the patient Neostoicism of Justus Lipsius and politically active Senecan Stoicism. Arruntius navigates those tensions through Ciceronian ideals of friendship, which provide an alternative to the rampant flattery and tyranny at Tiberius’ court. I show that the play responds to larger political anxieties concerning James I's recent ascension to the throne, and that interpreting early modern Stoicism as entirely passive disregards the complex discourse of friendship that permeates the period.

Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism: The De Bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius

Thomas Hendrickson's The De Bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius is a scholarly introduction, translation, and commentary on the noted and influential history of ancient libraries by Justus Lipsius (1546–1607). Going beyond the story of mainly Egyptian, Greek, and Roman libraries, Lipsius also used his book to promote the need for general, nonsectarian research libraries and institutions, all the more necessary in the intensely competitive religious arena of the time. De bibliothecis (maybe more commonly known as De bibliothecis syntagnma) first appeared in 1602 and had some twenty-four editions—many of which, we are told, are now available online—but previously there were no studies of how the publication changed over time nor any adequate critical translation. Hendrickson gives both the original text and a new translation on the facing page, while his introduction and extensive commentaries flesh out the meanings of the Lipsius text and offer a more current but nonnarrative understanding of these libraries. In focusing on an individual if important manuscript, his bibliography presents a wealth of specialized textual studies. Readers wanting more on ancient libraries themselves might read Olof Pedersen, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, 1998), Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 2001), or Yun Lee Too, The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 2010).Lipsius was a noted Humanist scholar of somewhat flexible religious principles able to move professionally across the all-important Catholic–Lutheran–Calvinist divides of the day, not unlike some other historians and librarians like Peter Lambeck or for that matter Lipsius's successor at the University of Leiden, the great Joseph Scaliger, neither of whom figures in Hendrickson's story, but he does conclude that Lipsius “was a Stoic whose homeland was ancient Rome” (4).The only previous English translation was by the American public librarian John Cotton Dana, whose access to sources and Latin were both severely limited, relying more on a French translation that used a different version of the text, so this Hendrickson work is doubly welcome. De bibliothecis is itself sometimes more quotations or lists from classical sources than a strict recounting of libraries and librarians as identification of texts was the main interest of bibliophiles and librarians at the time. Hendrickson received his Ph.D. in classics at UC Berkeley and appears very informed on the sources and subsequent works. He points out that writings about libraries in the ancient world should be seen as contemporary metaphors “for ambition, political power, military dominance, and religious authority” (12).De bibliothecis was both a historical survey of non-Christian ancient libraries and a plea for princely funding of research libraries that had little result in the Netherlands but did influence the creation of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan in 1609. “There is,” Hendrickson comments, “an irony in that Lipsius's goal in writing the DB seems not so much to have been the creation of a major work of scholarship as the inducement of a wealthy donor to fund a library” (165). The book was published by the famous Plantin house, a point explored at least briefly by Hendrickson. He presents an ingenious chart of the relationships among the various authorized and unauthorized editions, which gives useful insights to publishing in the early seventeenth century. Hendrickson's main purpose is to bring scholarly edition of De bibliothecis to a modern audience. Despite the cost, this book is worthy of consideration at all major historical collections and graduate library schools.

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

The letters of Eustachijus Valavičius and Leonas Sapiega to and from Justus Lipsius

The spread of humanist ideas that had arisen across Europe also reached the intellectuals of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A close correspondence was maintained with one of the European humanists, Justus Lipsius. This article presents a biography of Lipsius and examines the particulars of his letters to and from two Lithuanian intellectuals: Eustachijus Valavičius, who later became the Bishop of Vilnius, and Leonas Sapiega, who was the Chancellor of Lithuania and later served as its Grand Hetman. The purpose of the article is to determine the significance of this correspondence in the context of intercultural relations between Lithuania and Holland. To explore this topic, two tasks were identified: first, to identify the role in these epistolary dialogues of the individuals thanks to whom the contact with Lipsius was established; second, to compare the fundamental similarities and differences of the language used in the letters. The letters written by Valavičius and Sapiega to Lipsius and the answer written by Lipsius to Valavičius, kept in the archives of Leiden University, are examined in the article. In addition, the characteristics of Lipsius s letters are detailed in the article and the history of the letters is reviewed. It is determined in the article that these correspondents who wished to write a letter to Lipsius made use of intermediaries who were well-acquainted with the humanist. Considerable attention is paid to such intermediaries in the letters. Moreover, when analyzing the letters, demonstration of very warm feelings is quite noticeable. It is claimed in the article that the correspondence with the Lithuanian intellectuals occurred relatively late in Lipsius s life, and his death ended the communication that had only just begun to develop with Lithuanian intellectuals.

The last letter of Justus Lipsius to Ascanio Colonna: Philip Rubens, the roman circle and the neo-stoic ideal of lifestyle shared with his younger brother Peter Paul

The last letter of Justus Lipsius to Ascanio Colonna: Philip Rubens, the roman circle and the neo-stoic ideal of lifestyle shared with his younger brother Peter Paul

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

Welcome from the Editors: A Brief History of LCHS

Late Antiquity and the Antiquarian

Arnaldo Momigliano, the most influential modern student of antiquarianism, advanced the view that there was a late antique antiquarianism, but also lamented the absence of study of the history of antiquarianism in this period. Part of the challenge, however, has been to define the object of such a study. Rather than “finding” antiquarianism in late antiquity as Momigliano did, this article argues that a history that offers explicit analogies between late antique evidence and the avowed antiquarianism of early modern Europe allows a more self-conscious and critical history of late antique engagement with the past. The article offers three examples of this form of analysis, comparing practices of statue collecting in Renaissance Rome and the late Roman West, learned treatises on the Roman army by Vegetius and Justus Lipsius, and feelings of attachment to a local past as a modern antiquarian stereotype and in a pair of letters to and from Augustine of Hippo.

Huir del amor: Emblemática y paisaje en una nueva pintura de Otto van Veen

En el anonimato durante siglos y de gran tamaño, la pintura objeto de este estudio se restituye a Otto van Veen. Por su composición, modelos y estilo se vincula con su obra conocida, y se compara, entre otras obras, con Hércules y la Hidra del museo de Budapest y con el Cristo muerto de la iglesia de Sint-Waudru de Mons, Bélgica. El asunto se asocia con la emblemática a la que Van Veen se dedicó activamente. Los versos de las Elegías de Propercio en el margen inferior del lienzo reflejan el profundo conocimiento de la literatura clásica resultante de la formación humanista del pintor, al tiempo que advierten contra la inutilidad de huir del amor. Un mensaje moral asido en los principios del Neoestoicismo fundado por su gran amigo Justus Lipsius. A propósito de la ejecución del paisaje, se excluye la posibilidad de la intervención de otra mano, dadas su inclinación al género y la ausencia de evidencias documentales de tal tipo de colaboración. El hallazgo de esta pintura viene a sumarse a la relativamente limitada producción que del maestro se conoce en España hasta la fecha.

Justus Lipsius, Andrew Marvell, and Epistolary Style

While Marvell’s letters provide an invaluable resource for Marvell’s life and milieu, they also must be understood as carefully crafted artifacts in their own right, illuminating in their artistry as well as in the information they convey. This essay demonstrates the influence of the Epistolica Institutio (1591), by Belgian humanist Justus Lipsius, on Marvell’s approach to letter-writing, especially in the ways in which Marvell accommodates his stylistic choices to specific rhetorical occasions. Throughout his correspondence, Marvell adheres to the Lipsian definition of the familiar letter and employs various stylistic gambits to further his purposes. His May – June 1663 constituency correspondence, for example, reveals a high level of rhetorical strategizing, in keeping with Lipsian principles, as Marvell attempts to ease his Hull Corporation patrons into the prospect of his participation in the Carlisle embassy to Russia later in the year. Meanwhile, Marvell’s August 1667 letter of condolence to John Trott illustrates the close relationship between style and the Lipsian prescription that a letter can be simply a bearer of feeling as well as of news. In light of their often hidden artistry, letter-writing likely served as a source of pleasure for Marvell during his private moments, in much the same way that writing poems did.

The state and civility: a crucial nexus

ABSTRACTThe study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this body of work in no position to fully appreciate the crucial role of the state. Our main argument here is that civility emerged alongside the modern state in early-modern Europe to form an ongoing state–civility nexus, a nexus by which the state produces and maintains conditions that allow civility to flourish, in turn allowing civility to help the state maintain itself, particularly by restraining the state’s raw power. We pursue this argument by exploring two sets of writings. One set is composed of work by early-modern writers, especially Thomas Hobbes, with some attention paid to four others: Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius. The second set is composed of work by twentieth-century writers, especially Norbert Elias, with some attention paid to two others: Max Weber and Edward Shils.

Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation

Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation

Cervantes y el humanismo. El somnium humanista en la Cueva de Montesinos (El coloquio de los perros y Quijote, II, 22–23)

Abstract Miguel de Cervantes lived a time of transition between the 15th century humanism and new literary genres that we identify with the aesthetic and ideological leadership of Justus Lipsius (1547-1606). Focusing especially on El coloquio de los perros and on chapters II, 22 and II, 23 of Don Quixote, the essay examines Cervantes’ use of the genre of somnium for various purposes. Especially in chapter II, 23 of Don Quixote, Cervantes criticizes the new literary genre boomed at the end of the 16th century in the light of his own aesthetic convictions from the reflection on the Poetics of Aristotle. By doing so, Cervantes expresses aesthetic positions of great originality, and of a singular, almost individual independence from dominant poetic and rhetoric currents at the beginning of the 17th century.

Realism vs utopianism

Abstract 1516 saw the publication of three important works. First of all, it is the year of Thomas More’s Utopia. But it is also the year in which Erasmus published his major political work The Education of the Christian Prince. The third work even appeared with the same publisher as More’s Utopia, viz. Nicolaas Everaerts’s Topica or legal commonplaces. All three works are remarkable in their own way. Erasmus represents a tradition that goes back to Petrarch and that saw the well-being of society as totally dependent on the virtuousness of its prince. For Thomas More this was far too risky and therefore he sketched a radical alternative that was based on a reorganisation of society as a whole. However appealing his imaginary island was, it is remarkable that within the domain of political theory it did not attract too much attention. Most authors focused on another work, that was conceived in the very same period, viz. Machiavelli’s Prince. The present article will shed light on these developments by focusing on the work of two further early-modern intellectuals active in the Netherlands. Both Justus Lipsius and Leonardus Lessius, whose work bears a strong resemblance to that of Everaerts, looked for the ideal society. And this was not a society after the model of More, but a society modelled after a well-defined form of Machiavellism.

Miracles in translation: Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and two Dutch translations

In 1604 the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) published a Latin treatise on miracles said to have happened on account of the intercession of the Virgin Mary in Halle, a small town near Brussels. There are two Dutch translations of Lipsius' book, one by Albert van Oosterwijck, published in Delft in 1605, the other by Philips Numan, published in Brussels in 1607. The translations are very similar but they are very differently framed. As a result, they are worlds apart, and indeed they were written and printed almost within sight, but on opposite sides, of a shifting military front line dividing the emergent, Calvinist‐dominated Dutch Republic in the north from the Catholic Spanish Netherlands in the south. This article considers the propaganda value of pilgrim sites like Halle and Scherpenheuvel, and explores the two contrasting translations of Lipsius' treatise against the background of the ideological war of words between Reformation and Counter‐Reformation apologists.

Giseliniana. De quelques poèmes de l'humaniste flamand Victor Ghyselinck (1539-1591)

After a survey of the career of Flemish humanist Victor Ghyselinck (1539-1591), friend of Janus Dousa and Justus Lipsius, N. Istasse proposes his translated edition of some of his various unpublished poems. The forty-four hendecasyllabic verses of his De usu epithetorum are to be found at the end of the Plantin edition (1564) of the Epithetorum epitome of Ravisius Textor. The second piece is consists of eight elegiac distichs poem addressed to his friend, the Flemish philologist Theodoor Poelman (Pulmannus). Finally, the author underscores four epigrams taken from the manuscript collection Manes Catulli and dedicated to famous contemporaries such as Justus Lipsius or Abraham Ortelius.

Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Martin Pickavé, Lisa Shapiro (review)

Reviewed by: Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Martin Pickavé, Lisa Shapiro Sander W. de Boer Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro, editors. Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 285. Cloth, £45.00. As the editors rightly note, historians of philosophy have paid relatively little attention to the relation between emotions and cognition, focusing instead on their connection to morals. This volume, consisting of thirteen papers all written by well-established scholars, aims to remedy this. It moreover aims to trace the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern discussions of the topic, and to infuse contemporary debates “with a host of new ideas regarding the relationship between emotions, cognition, and reason, or the way emotions figure in our cognitive lives” (2). The volume clearly succeeds in its first aim. The first few papers show that already within the Aristotelian tradition, philosophers generally argued for some cognitive component involved in the emotions. A noteworthy aspect of this period is the distinctive approach to human passions (emotions) of contrasting these to angelic (disembodied) passions on the one hand and animal (non–rational) passions on the other, as shown by Peter King and by Dominik Perler. A second aspect is the distinction between passions that belong to our sensitive and embodied nature, and those that belong to our rational nature. The latter were labelled ‘passions of the will,’ and are discussed by Ian Drummond and by Claude Panaccio. The link between emotions and cognition became even stronger in the early modern period. Shapiro argues that, for Spinoza, perception itself is always affectionately laden and that “sensations and emotions are thus not different phenomenological kinds” (214). Even understanding is always tied to emotions for Spinoza, as becomes clear from Lilli Alanen’s paper, which details the relation between our imagination and the passions. Also included are papers on Hume (Amy M. Schmitter), Malebranche (Deborah Brown), and Descartes (Dennis Des Chene). The volume is less successful in its second aim, although the editors included two papers on the Renaissance period. Simo Knuuttila traces the impact of the discussions on the passions of the will in some sixteenth-century authors. He announces that he will also discuss comments by “some other early modern authors” (116), but curiously this part seems to be missing. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer’s paper on Renaissance debates on Platonic love offers an original and intriguing case study on the possible relations between emotions and cognition. The theme is absent in the medieval period and had little impact on early modern authors, but is interesting in its own right. The volume as a whole would have benefited from the inclusion of a contribution focused more directly on the “continuities and discontinuities” in question. Given its impact on seventeenth-century philosophy, a paper on Justus Lipsius’s Neostoicism would have been a welcome addition, especially since several contributors discuss Stoic influences. The contribution by the late Paul Hoffman, lastly, deserves special mention. His paper ranges over all periods in an attempt to find the different ways in which the inclinations of our will have been understood. The volume mostly succeeds in its third aim. Almost all papers, with the exception of Knuuttila’s, can be recommended to non-specialists, which greatly adds to its usefulness. Equally important is that the contributions convincingly show that many of the philosophers discussed endorsed neither a cognitivist approach nor equated emotions to second order perceptions, which all but guarantees that one will encounter novel views when perusing the volume. And as Pickavé nicely illustrates in his deflationary reading of Adam Wodeham, the issue at stake in discussions on the emotions need not even have been the question whether one should endorse a cognitivist account or not. Comparing authors from different periods is never easy, and it seems to me that the editors may have underestimated some of the (terminological) difficulties involved. They wisely tackle the first obstacle in their brief introduction, namely that the terms used to designate what we would now call emotions varied (7–8). But this is just one of several difficulties one would likely encounter. To give...

Erasmus and the Renaissance Republic of Letters ed. by Stephen Ryle (review)

Reviewed by: Erasmus and the Renaissance Republic of Letters ed. by Stephen Ryle W. R. Albury Ryle, Stephen, ed., Erasmus and the Renaissance Republic of Letters (Disputatio, 24), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. xviii, 474; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €110.00; ISBN 9782503530307. The first volume of P. S. Allen’s edition of the letters of Erasmus, the Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, appeared in 1906. Although Allen died in 1933, before the series was completed, the remaining volumes of letters were seen through the press by his wife H. M. Allen and his colleague H. W. Garrod, with the last one, volume 11, appearing in 1947. Finally in 1958 an Index volume was published, completing this edition, which had already become a mainstay of Renaissance scholarship. To celebrate the centenary of Allen’s first volume, an international conference was held at Oxford in 2006 which brought together scholars from eight countries to discuss such matters as the editing and translation of Erasmus’s letters, his relations with some important contemporaries (e.g., Ulrich von Hutten, Dirk Martens, Juan Luis Vives, Wolfgang Capito, Etienne Dolet, and Duke George of Saxony), and a number of more general issues relating to the Erasmian legacy (e.g., its use in the seventeenth century, by religious apologists in England and Justus Lipsius on the continent, and its misconstrual in early twentieth-century English literary criticism). The present volume brings this material together under a title that takes advantage of the pun available in English, but in few if any other languages, whereby the same term may refer either to personal correspondence, in particular, or to literary works, in general. Hence, for the purposes of this volume, ‘the republic of letters’ consists both of an epistolary network centred on Erasmus and a broader community of published authors and their readers. Apart from the Foreword and Preface, which are in English, the twenty-one chapters include thirteen in English, seven in French, and one in Italian. Usually, but not always, quotations in Latin and Greek are left untranslated. This feature of the collection demands a fair level of linguistic competence from any reader who might intend to go through the book from start to finish, but given the heterogeneous nature of the topics covered in the work, it seems likely that most readers would want to focus on one or a few specific chapters rather than attempting to take in the volume as a whole. Readers wishing to follow this selective approach will be helped by the general Index, which appears to be very comprehensive, and a second Index of references to the works of Erasmus. [End Page 398] W. R. Albury University of New England Copyright © 2015 W. R. Albury

Reading Descartes as a Stoic

Reading Descartes as a Stoic: Appropriate Action, Virtue, and the Passions Donald Rutherford (University of California, San Diego) Although Descartes does not use the terms officium or devoir with any frequency, his ethics gives a central place to the notion of appropriate action in a sense reminiscent of the Stoics’s kathekon. Within this category are included a human being’s duties to God and to other human beings, and actions whose aptness stems from their promotion of the survival and health of the body. While noting these parallels, I also show how Descartes’s accounts of virtue and the passions diverge from Stoic views, ascribing these differences in part to his acceptance of the threefold division of goods (moral, bodily, external) rejected by the Stoics. Introduction Stoicism has served as a reference point for many interpretations of Descartes’s moral philosophy. Descartes himself provides support for such an association in letters to Princess Elisabeth and in works from the Discours de la methode to Les Passions de l’âme. Yet caution must be exercised in extrapolating from this evidence. In contrast to Neostoic writers such as Justus Lipsius and Guillaume Du Vair, Descartes claims no allegiance to Stoicism or to any other sect of the ancients, whose methods he finds inadequate. Moreover, there are substantial doctrinal differences between Descartes and the Stoics. Given this, the attempt to label him a “Stoic” in any strict sense of the word must be rejected. 1 Despite this conclusion, I believe, there remains a case for reading Descartes as a Stoic, or for adopting Stoicism as a framework within which to interpret his moral philosophy. Taking up this perspective requires assuming that Stoicism is relevant to the comprehension of Descartes’s ethics, but it does not commit one to the thesis that Descartes is a Stoic, or that Stoicism is unique in the light it casts on his views. As I intend my title, it signifies the strategy of elucidating Descartes’s ethical theory by probing the parallels between it and Stoic ethics. Irrespective of Descartes’s intentions or his knowledge of Stoicism, his ethical thought follows channels dug by the Stoics. By making these traces explicit, we can deepen our understanding of his moral philosophy and of the extent to which ancient patterns of ethical thought persist in the early modern period. 2 In what follows, I pursue this strategy with special attention to the Stoic concept of kathekon, or officium, expressed variously in French as ‘convenable’ and ‘devoir’, and in English as ‘proper function’, ‘appropriate action’, and ‘duty’ (to mention only a few of the possibilities). The range of Cf. Olivo 1999, who surveys the earlier literature on the topic. Among other recent studies that explore Stoic elements in Descartes’s ethics, see Marshall 1998; Mehl 1999; Shapiro 2011. 2 In speaking of Descartes’s “moral philosophy” or “ethics”, I refer to the views expressed in his late letters and in the Passions, as against the “morale par provision” of the Discours or “la plus haute et la plus parfaite Morale” projected in the preface to the French translation of the Principia. On the relation among these different versions of his moral philosophy, see Rodis-Lewis 1957; Kambouchner 2008.