This article presents the Vita Aristotelis (1429) as an extension of Bruni's campaign to win acceptance for his new view of Aristotle as an independently valid guide to the secular life. The dynamics and structure of the Vita are traced to Brum's attempt to counter the impact of the imminent publication of the Lives of Diogenes Laertius in a Latin translation by Ambrogio Traversari. In refuting the negative aspects of the portrait offered by Diogenes, Bruni developed and defended a selective, rhetorically based approach to biography that was novel in relation to classical and medieval interpretations of the genre.

In the fifteenth century, Guarino Guarini, Ludovico Carbone, Francesco Filelfo, and other humanists composed and delivered Latin orations at courtly weddings in Ferrara, Naples, and Milan. In these epithalatmia, which are mostly unpublished, orators adapt a classically inspired conception of marriage to Italian court culture. They defend physical beauty and sexual pleasure, praise learned brides, and assert the importance of mutual affection, revealing a complex picture of ideal gender relations in courts. Against the ancient and Christian anti-marriage ascetic traditions, humanists offer biblical, philosophical, political, economic, and hedonistic arguments in defense of marriage.

This essay is based upon the methodological assumption that by examining an exceptional event in an exceptional place one can unmask the hidden assumptions of the mundane and quotidian. The problem is to determine what the idea of community could have meant in north Italian towns and villages during the Renaissance. Depositions about a brawl in an otherwise insignificant small town provide an opportunity to examine how the idea of community was crystallized in three ways: community as social interaction in an institutional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion

Two small nude horsemen located in the armorial decoration of Donatello's Gattamelata yield new insights about the use of Greek sources in Renaissance art. Here it is speculated that Donatello was informed by a drawing or carved gemstone provided by Ciriaco d'Ancona that represented riders in the Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon. Donatello may have included the figures as a learned reference to delight a circle of intellectuals in Padua, including Ciriaco and Francesco Barbaro, who wrote dedicatory texts for the monument. It is subsequently argued that Leon Battista Alberti's treatise De equo animante (ca. 1444-47) and Donatello's Gattamelata appear to have been mutually influential.

This article examines the presence of women in fourteenth-century Venetian scuole piccole and describes their participation. According to surviving confraternity statutes, women seldom shared in the governance of the entire confraternity. But female office holders were often responsible for their sisters in matters of illness, death, burial, and sometimes moral conduct. They also made contributions and left numerous legacies to their scuole. Membership lists sometimes reveal the social and occupational status of women. Information on one confraternity for women only, the Scuola d'Umiltà, survives.

The Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) was an influential, charismatic, and popular preacher, and an important figure in the political world of Renaissance Florence, but neglected in modern scholarship. This study offers a thorough summary of Dominici's political views as well as a biographical portrait, a bibliographical survey, and a discussion of Dominici's preaching style. The article draws on a large, unpublished collection of Dominici's sermons from the Biblioteca Riccardiana, dating from 1400 to 1406. Dominici emerges as an ambivalent participant in Florentine politics, advocating some of its civic values such as the active life and patriotism, while fiercely criticizing humanist ideals such as the use of rhetoric in politics and the rise of the professional politician

In 1482, the episcopal ring of St. Zenobius, patron of the Florentine see, was sent from Florence to France in the hope that it would cure the ailing King Louis XI. This secondary relic belonged to the Girolami, a banking and mercantile family that claimed to be related to the saint. The present study examines the use of St. Zenobius’ ring as a means of international and local diplomatic exchange. In addition, it traces the history of the Girolami's patronage of St. Zenobius’ cult and relics, places it within the context of contemporary devotional practices, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the patronage of privately-owned relics in Renaissance

Cariteo's Endimione (1509), a lyric sequence published in Naples shortly after the Spanish takeover of the Aragonese kingdom, advertises a prominent debt to Petrarch's Rime sparse. Commentaries in the earliest printed editions of the latter suggest politically charged models for this sequence. They represent Petrarch, like Cariteo, as a skilled rhetorician, a foreigner in the service of lords and aristocracy outside his ancestral domain, and an ardent proponent of monarchism with a pan-Italian sensibility. These qualities befitted Cariteo at a time when he was articulating his loyalty to the newly installed Spanish viceregal government as a defense against French invasion.

If imitation is the highest form of praise, then Girolamo Benivienis canto describing his otherworldly encounter with Dante's spirit is certainly a tribute to the author of the Divine Comedy. Despite its title, however, Benivieni's project is not simply epideictic. In it, Benivieni represents Dante in a highly anachronistic way, as a kind of spokesman for the piagnoni, the ardent supporters of Girolamo Savonarola's program of moral austerity and Florentine republican politics between the 1490s and the first decades of the Cinquecento. This study argues that Benivieni articulates his controversial, ideological vision in a necessarily prudent way by appropriating Dante as a safe and authoritative cultural icon and adopting a deliberately ambiguous symbolic language, which lauds himself and his politics as much as it does Dante.

Following the format of a catalogue manuscript description, this study analyses the design and contents of a manuscript presented to king Henry VII of England about 1492-93. Featuring an epic account of the 1492 English invasion of France and a pastoral dialogue praising the domestic peace imposed by the Tudor regime, the five poems are the work of a little-known Italian writer “Johannes Opicius, “ in a stylishly written and decorated copy. Like other contemporary presentations, especially the works of the early Tudor laureate Bernard Andre”, the verse is as classicizing as the design is Italianate and humanist, innovative features for English literary culture. Like other cognate products, however, Opicius’ performance lacks properties usually associated with literature. The work was not for reading nor for recirculation, owing its inspiration solely to a wish to gratify the monarch. The presentation was chiefly a matter of performing the magnificence of the king.

Scholars are now devoting more attention to the reception of the Church Fathers during the Renaissance and Reformation. While Saint Jerome's function as icon and exemplar has been the subject of substantial study, his role as an author, read and edited during the Renaissance, still awaits thorough investigation. This essay examines how Erasmus of Rotterdam, the greatest Renaissance editor of Jerome, read the Church Fathers most elaborate polemic in favor of virginity's moral and spiritual superiority to marriage, the Adversus Jovinianum. An investigation of Erasmus’ editorial apparatus for this text, especially his scholia, reveals a complex reading. Erasmus applauded Jerome's rhetorical skill but ventured cautious criticism of his scriptural exegesis without taking a firm position in the controversy over the relative merits of virginity and marriage.

This essay analyzes vernacular texts on reproduction from sixteenth-century Germany. It examines religious texts, including sermons and devotional treatises for pregnant women, as well as medical texts, such as midwifery manuals, books on the “secrets of nature,” and anatomical treatises. Vernacular authors, both medical and clerical, ascribed enormous spiritual and symbolic significance to human generation. Conception, pregnancy, and birth were linked to the biblical account of the creation and fall of mankind. In the creation of the child in the womb, sixteenthcentury Germans saw an echo of the original divine act of creation. And in the sufferings of a woman in labor they saw a reenactment of Christ's Passion. Discussions of reproduction thus served as a starting point for meditations on original sin, human mortality, and the relationship between body and soul.

The impact of Dutch on Erasmus’ works is a neglected aspect of studies on the Netherlandish humanist. This article explores the presence of the Low Countries vernacular in the Colloquia, the letters, and the Adagiorum collectanea. It argues that Erasmus used proverbs of Dutch provenance in the same way as ancient adages, that is, as arguments and stylistic devices. Even though there are relatively few vernacular proverbs in his writings, the evidence gathered here demonstrates that, contrary to established opinion, he valued his native language and freely employed it in various works. To gain a better appreciation of his notion of proverbs and his” estimate of their worth, this essay starts with an analysis of his introduction to the Adagia.

From the time of their courtship until death parted them forty years later, Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511-1592) and Laura Battiferra (1523-1589) nurtured a loving relationship with reciprocal support for complementary careers. Their childless union generated two bodies of art, vast and beautiful. Renaissance contemporaries esteemed the Ammannati as a rarity, creative peers in a close marriage, but history has indifferently divorced them, dropping Bartolomeo to the ranks of second best and pushing his accomplished wife into obscurity. Reunited, the couple can return as they deserve, in the entwined lives that enriched their joint corpus and enhanced the fame each won as an individual — she for her poetry, praised by the most prominent men and women of culture in Counter Reformation Italy; he in his dual activity as sculptor and architect for projects ordered by popes in Rome, leaders of the new Society of Jesus, and three generations of Medici rulers in Florence.

Illustration and text in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) have been long considered intricately related yet the book's ornate, invented language has made study of such interaction difficult. This essay reconsiders their connections through a close analysis of two woodcuts and accompanying text in light of the poetical-rhetorical conventions of contemporary Petrarchan imitation in Italy. This reveals how Francesco Colonna visually and textually adapted, in a playful way, traditional subjects of vernacular lyric poetry: the beauty of the poet's beloved, and the lover's own emotions, characterized through metaphor and other tropes.

This article examines the role played by royal doctors in forming an empirical political science in France at the end of the sixteenth century. Bringing with them took from the Galenic tradition, doctors such as Rodolphe Le Maistre, Abraham-Nicolas de La Framboisière, and Jean Héroard doubled as political counselors. They not only looked for ways to heal the king's body, they also looked for ways to heal and regulate the body of the nation. Their new vision of the monarch as a practicing physician of the state is an essential yet unknown facet of the origins of political modernity.

This essay examines a subject largely ignored in Tasso criticism: the role of supernatural powers in the epic action of the Liberata. Tasso introduces divine characters, notably God and Satan, at several crucial moments. The presence in the epic plot of an intervening God who is at once partisan and omnipotent brings to the fore certain narrative and theological problems; these problems are not Tasso's alone, but inhere in the attempt to construct a Christian supernatural on the classical epic model. The divine action of the Liberata sheds light on the religious ideology of the poem, and on an issue of broader significance: the uneasy marriage of monotheism and epic narrative.

This article explores the motivations behind the Florentine militia ordinance of 1506 and Niccolò Machiavelli's involvement. A major problem with regard to contemporary discourse on the militia is its complete, or almost complete, absence of references to the military system of the ancient Roman republic. It is here argued that this silence was a conscious strategy on the part of Machiavelli and his collaborators who, in a cultural climate extremely hostile to the ancient Roman model, chose to adopt a pragmatic step-by-step approach to the militia, downplaying its true inspiration.

The teatro all'italiana, or Italian opera house with boxes, was one of the most successful building types invented during the Renaissance, but fragmentary and ambiguous evidence has made locating its origins difficult. This article proposes that those origins are to be found in two theaters for commedia dell'arte built in Venice in 1580 and destroyed by order of the Council of Ten in 1585 (m.v.). The history of these two theaters is sketched here for the first time by means of documents recently found in the Archivio di Stato, Venice, that also include new information related to Palladia's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. The role the two Venetian theaters played in the economic, political and social history of the city is suggested.