Abstract
The Florentine merchant and humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) combined a successful career as a businessman, civic official, and diplomat with extraordinary intellectual achievements that included a vast library (now in the Vatican), a knowledge of both classics and Hebrew, and a vast array of compositions in Italian and Latin – orations, treatises, dialogues, and translations of Aristotle, the Psalms, and the New Testament. Like his contemporaries, Manetti principally devoted himself to the field of ethics, from Peripatetic moral tracts to the consolatory literature of the Greeks, and argued for a new positive vision of humankind in stark contrast to the pessimism of medieval thought. Yet he was deeply devout and composed ten books of Christian apology Adversus Iudaeos et Gentes [Against the Jews and Gentiles], in which he rejects the beliefs and practices of pagan religion and Pentateuchal legislation, and he exalts the teaching of Christ. Together with Lorenzo Valla, he is significant as a precursor of Renaissance philology for his insistence on applying textual criticism to the most “sacred” texts of the Western tradition, Aristotle, and the Bible.
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Marsh, D. (2020). Manetti, Giannozzo. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_369-1
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