Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) was a celebrated humanist orator, historian, philosopher, and scholar of the early Renaissance. Son of a wealthy Florentine merchant, he participated actively in the public life of the Florentine republic and embraced the new humanist scholarship of the quattrocento, oriented to the service of the state and the reform of religion. Mastering not only classical Latin but also Greek and Hebrew, he gained access to a whole library of sources previously unknown in the Latin West. Among the fruits of his studies is his treatise Against the Jews and the Gentiles, an apologia for Christianity in ten books that redefines religion in terms of “true piety,” and relates the historical development of the pagan and Jewish religions to the life of Jesus. The present volume includes the first critical edition of Books I–IV, together with the first translation of those books into any modern language.

The Renaissance recovery of ancient biographical writers such as Plutarch, Suetonius, and Jerome led to a wave of imitations by Renaissance authors from Petrarch to Machiavelli. The orator, diplomat, and statesman Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459), an expert in Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, was among the leading humanist biographers of the Renaissance.

This collection brings together his famous biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which helped establish the canon of Italian literature, as well as his parallel lives of Socrates and Seneca, which remained the standard biographical sources for those philosophers throughout the early modern period. It also includes extended excerpts from two works, On Famous Men of Great Age and Against the Jews and the Gentiles, which contain biographical entries on a range of Italian literary figures from Brunetto Latini and Guido Cavalcanti to Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni.

Coluccio Salutati (1332–1406) was chancellor of the Florentine Republic (1375–1406) and the leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. As such, he was among the first humanists to apply his Classical learning to political theory and his rhetorical skills to the defense of republican liberty. This volume contains a new English version of Salutati’s important treatise On Tyranny, Antonio Loschi’s Invective against the Florentines, which provoked Salutati’s long Reply to a Slanderous Detractor, and a selection of Salutati’s state letters written for the Florentine Republic. Most of the texts are here critically edited and translated into English for the first time.