The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (CHRP), published in 1988, aimed to put the study of the philosophical works produced from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century on a new, more solid footing. The editors (Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and myself), along with those who contributed to the volume, sought to demonstrate that the philosophy of this period was worthy of the attention not only of historians and Renaissance specialists, but also of philosophers – at least those interested in the history of their own discipline. While a significant amount of ground has been covered, the goal of placing the philosophy of the Renaissance on the same level as that of the Middle Ages or seventeenth century has by no means been achieved: witness the fact that the Renaissance has no established place in the philosophy curriculum and makes only occasional appearances in university teaching of subjects such as intellectual history.

One reason why Renaissance philosophy has been neglected in the United States and Britain is that a relatively small number of works have been translated into English. The great majority of Renaissance philosophical texts remain, in consequence, inaccessible to students and non-specialists. The present volume, it is hoped, will help to improve this situation by providing twenty-three new translations of works discussed in my chapter on ‘moral philosophy’ in CHRP. In order to increase the amount of primary source material available to an Anglophone readership, an attempt has been made to select texts which have not previously been translated into English.