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Patrician Sages and the Humanist Cynic: Francesco Filelfoand the Ethics of World Citizenship*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

W. Scott Blanchard
W. Scott Blanchard*
Affiliation:
Misericordia University
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Abstract

The fifteenth-century humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) spent much of the period from 1429 to 1444 involved with Florentine politics, becoming a strong advocate on behalf of the patrician oligarchs, many of whom were exiled in 1434 at the return of Cosimo de’ Medici from eleven months of exile. Filelfo’s works from the period, including his satires, the Oratio ad exules, and the consolatory treatise entitled Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, were a response to the Florentine political crisis. Filelfo demonstrates in these works not only a rhetorical and political purpose on behalf of his patrons, but also takes the opportunity to reflect on the notion of world citizenship, a philosophical concept derived largely from Stoic and Cynic sources.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , Winter 2007 , pp. 1107 - 1169
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

The research for this essay was supported by grants from The Renaissance Society of America/Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento and the College Misericordia Faculty Development Committee, to both of whom I am grateful. An earlier version of the paper was discussed at the Wesleyan University Seminar on the Renaissance, and I wish to thank Laurie Nussdorfer, Marcello Simonetta, and John Paoletti for the invitation to present there. I also wish to thank David Marsh, Diana Robin, Riccardo Fubini, Chris Celenza, Silvia Fiaschi, and an anonymous reader for helping me at various stages of my work on Filelfo. Citations of Filelfo’s letters are from both the Venice 1502 edition, and from ms. Triv 873. Quotations from the Satyrae are given in English translation in the text, and cited in the footnotes by book (decade), hecatostich, and line number(s); the footnotes also give the Latin, cited by page number in Fiaschi’s edition for decades 1–5, or by folio number of the Milan 1476 editio princeps for decades 6–10. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. I have used the following abbreviations for libraries in citations of manuscripts: Amb = Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; Triv = Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana; FBN = Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale; BMawr = Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Library, Pennsylvania.

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