Chapter 16 - Plutarch in the Italian Renaissance

Summary

Very few ancient Greek authors were read in any form in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Though hugely popular in antiquity – and in Byzantium – Plutarch’s works are no exception to this. When the early Italian Renaissance humanists permanently changed the course of Greek studies in the West, Plutarch became one of the most widely read authors of the period. This chapter will discuss how Plutarch’s name first began to resurface in twelfth-century Latin writers, how he was among the earliest Greek writers to be translated into the modern vernaculars, and how, in a long series of Latin translations, the Parallel Lives became bestsellers in the fifteenth century. The chapter will also discuss how his works influenced Renaissance ideas about ethics and political thought.