Abstract: 20 AUGUST 1924 * 4 AUGUST 20?8EUGENE F. RICE JR., William R. Shepherd Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University, died on 4 August 2008, 1 in his eighty-fourth year. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, he had grown up in Puerto Rico, where his father managed plantations of a Boston-based sugar company. At age fourteen Rice left for Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts, then went on to study at Philips Exeter Academy, and in 1942 entered Harvard, completing his undergraduate degree there in 1947 after three years of service in Army Signal Corps. By then he had acquired elements of his remarkable cultural sophistication - in languages, literature, history, music, and art - which would underlie his scholarly accomplishments and his lifelong enjoyments and avocations.His precocity as a scholar quickly became apparent in Harvard's graduate school. His first term seminar paper so impressed his adviser, Professor Myron Gilmore, that he called on Rice personally, on a snowy winter day, to congratulate him and to advise him to publish paper forthwith. and Religious Tradition, 1495-1499, a study of Erasmus in his student years in Paris, appeared in Journal of History of Ideas almost exactly as it had been submitted to seminar.1 It has remained a significant contribution to library of Renaissance studies. Eighteen years after its first appearance, it was selected by Paul Oskar Kristeller to appear in collection of best papers published by JHI.Two of years that followed Rice spent at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, working on his dissertation, which was published in 1958. That study, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom, tackled one of most profound problems in late medieval and Renaissance history, transformation of concept of wisdom from theological contemplation to its secularization in moralism and action - from monastic vita contemplativa to civic vita activa. Searching writings of major figures in Europe's life from Petrarch to late Renaissance, Rice brought together into a coherent picture sensitive indicators of slow but steady secularization of idea of wisdom, in effect dominant concept of purpose and ideal conduct of life. It is a small book, but packed with details, clear in its structure, and written with grace and a distinctive style. It is perhaps enough to say of force of its scholarship that it impelled no less an authority than Hans Baron, leading authority on transition from otherworldliness to public engagement, from pursuit of salvation to civic humanism, to write a ten-thousand-word commentary on Rice's book, examining it in exquisite detail, qualifying it here, amending it there, refining some points and praising others. Though Baron questioned precise phasing of Rice's intellectual pattern of historical change, he wrote that book was brilliantly written and argued, that Rice had grasped the entire gamut of possible developments [in process of secularization] more firmly than any of his predecessors have done, and that this first fruit of a young scholar [was] an essential addition to quest of what was new and 'modern' in Renaissance.2From there Rice went on to two more major accomplishments while publishing a lucid survey, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559, and a wide range of essays, reviews, and commentaries both technical and general, editing several collections of papers, and supervising work of younger scholars, first at Cornell (1959-64), and thereafter, until his retirement in 1997, at Columbia.The first of major works that followed The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom was The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples and Related Texts (New York, 1972), which Rice had anticipated in a series of preparatory studies. It is a remarkable work of technical scholarship. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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