Justus Lipsius (1547-1606): his live, his works, his ideas, his network.

Lipsiuss prolific and international correspondence offers an eminent, but complex source of information about his life, his ideas, and his works against the background of contemporary events. The project aims at assimilating this information and existing partial studies about the humanist into an exhaustive intellectual biography. A first component will draw a portrait of Lipsiuss life in three parts: youth and education (1547-1577), his stay in Leiden (1578-1591), and his return to Leuven (1591-1606). The chapters on Leiden and Leuven also deal with Lipsiuss merits as an academic and a pedagogue. In the second component an international group of scholars is invited to focus on several aspects of Lipsiuss significance as a humanist, paying attention to his sources, his models, and the influence he had on later generations. The filological aspect will deal with his early, critical works, his authoritative editions of Tacitus and Seneca, and his idiosyncratic, but controversial style. Next there are the antiquarian treatises, in which the scholar studied some particular elements of life in Antiquity. A third aspect, the philosophical ideas, will discern between Lipsiuss perception of ancient philosophy, the Stoa in particular, and his own theories. A final aspect deals with the man Lipsius, combining chapters on the complex tradition and source-material of his correspondence as well as the evolution of his network, his contacts with the Officina Plantiniana, and the confessional polarisation in creating an image of Lipsius during the final years of his life and the period immediately following his death.

Keywords:Justus Lipsius

Disciplines:History