ABSTRACT
It is traditional, if not commonplace, to look on the last decades of the sixteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth as the 'autumn' of the Renaissance, a period marked at best by consolidation, at worst by decline l . It is alleged that political crises and confessional strife disrupt intellectual life both directly and indirectly, giving rise to a mentality often described as 'baroque', in which the optimism of the high Renaissance is succeeded by scepticism or even pessimism, serenity by violence and instability, conviction by doube. The respublica literaria is threatened by the gradual disintegration of the encyclopaedic aspirations of earlier generations of humanists, by increasing uncertainty as to whether learning and ethics, studia and mores, are as intimately linked as Erasmus claimed, by the manifest failure of scholars to agree on matters concerning religious truth3• The antagonism between established centres of learning, still dominated by scholasticism or neoAristotelianism, and radical movements associated with neoplatonism, with hermeticism, with alchemy, and with the observational and experimental sciences is reflected in the crisis faced by academic institutions, both long-established and of more recent foundation: a crisis exacerbated in German-speaking parts of Europe by the catastrophic events of the Thirty Years War4. While it has been shown that humanistic enquiry
continues to yield impressive scholarly results - the names of Joseph Scaliger, Denis Lambin, Marc-Antoine Muret, Justus Lipsius, Isaac Casaubon, Friedrich Sylburg spring to mind - this is often interpreted as yet another demonstration that the owl of Minerva flies at dusks ..
