Works by the later humanists (c. 1500 and after) and the English poet-humanists—including Castiglione, Cellini, Elyot, Erasmus, Jonson, Machiavelli, Montaigne, More, Pico della Mirandola, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Tasso, and Vasari—are readily available in many editions. The writings of the earlier humanists may be found in Brunetto Latini, The Book of the Treasure (1993); Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. by Renée Neu Watkins (1969); Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (1982), and Boccaccio on Poetry, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. by Charles G. Osgood (1956, reprinted 1978), a translation of the preface and Books XIV and XV of his De genealogia deorum gentilium; biographies of Dante by Boccaccio and Leonardo Bruni in The Earliest Lives of Dante, trans. by James Robinson Smith (1901, reprinted 1976); letters by Poggio Bracciolini in Two Renaissance Book Hunters, trans. by Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (1974); and works by Petrarch, including The Life of Solitude, trans. by Jacob Zeitlin (1924, reprinted 1978); “On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others,” trans. by Hans Nachod in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (eds.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (1948, reprinted 1971); and Petrarch’s Secret; or, The Soul’s Conflict with Passion, trans. by William H. Draper (1911, reprinted 1978). William Harrison Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, cited in the section above, contains valuable translations of works by Vergerio, Bruni, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), and Battista Guarino.
Sixteenth-century writings that reflect the breadth and vitality of humanistic attitudes are Juan Luis Vives, On Education, trans. by Foster Watson (1913, reprinted 1971); Girolamo Cardano, The Book of My Life, trans. by Jean Stoner (1930, reprinted 1962); Torquato Tasso, Tasso’s Dialogues, trans. by Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton (1982); and Paracelsus, Selected Writings, ed. by Jolande Jacobi, 2nd ed. (1958, reissued 1995; originally published in German, 1942). Robert Grudin