ABSTRACT
Justus Lipsius was born on 18 October 1547, which made 1997 the 450th anniversary of his birth, an occasion auspicious enough to have given rise to several attempts throughout Europe to reassess his significance, including important conferences at Rome and Louvain. Interest in Lipsius has increased following the colloquium organized by Aloïs Gerlo in 1987, with at least three major books and a number of articles having appeared in the wake of his publication of the colloquium papers.1 Five volumes of the critical edition of the Epistolae, covering Lipsius’s life from 1564 to 1592, have now appeared.2 Lipsius’s status as a great Renaissance scholar of the Low Countries, second in interest only to Erasmus himself, is being actively promoted, above all in his native land, present-day Belgium.
