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Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man. Edited by Christopher M. Bellitto, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson. New York: Paulist, 2004. 496 pp. $29.95 cloth.
This introductory text, published by Paulist Press, fills a need for a collection of accessible essays about the thought of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64). Because Nicholas lived and wrote during a pivotal point in history, and because of the unparalleled originality of his thought, he has been attracting increasing interest among philosophers, theologians, historians, students of canon law, and even mathematicians. This new curiosity has coincided with the six-hundredth anniversary of Nicholas of Cusa's birth (1401) and the worldwide celebrations and conferences that have accompanied it. This public notice has itself brought new inquiries about Cusanus, the Renaissance man.
The publication in recent years of a number of texts that range from collections of essays to reading guides to new translations has begun to locate Nicholas of Cusa both temporally and ideologically for new readers and scholars. Mentioning but a few of these would include: Clyde Lee Miller's Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press of...