from VI - LATIN AND VERNACULAR IN ITALIAN LITERARY THEORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
This chapter is concerned with the arguments put forward by Italian humanists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as to how and why poetry should be read, and therefore with one of the central themes of literary criticism, or more exactly literary theory, in the early Italian Renaissance. (The date from which the Renaissance starts is a matter over which opinions legitimately differ; here, as far as Italy is concerned, I am using the expression ‘early Renaissance’ to cover the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.) The study and imitation of the classical poets was, of course, a major humanist interest, and poetry occupied an important place in the new curriculum of secondary education. But of all the subjects with which the humanists were concerned it was also the most contentious. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Italian humanists were attacked from a number of quarters because of their poetic interests. The attack came from theologians, monks and the clergy, as well as from members of the established professions of law and medicine. Its main substance was the argument that classical poetry distracted men's minds from better things with stories that were not only pagan and therefore mendacious, but also lascivious and immoral. Moreover, they had been condemned both by classical figures such as Plato and Boethius and by Fathers of the church; ‘the songs of the poets are the food of devils’, St Jerome wrote for instance (Epist. 21.13 [CSEL 54]; see also Plato, Rep. 2.376-3, 403 and Boethius, De cons. phil. 1 met. 1).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.