Renaissance Humanism

An extensive and detailed examination, hitherto never carried out, of the numerous editions of Greek and Latin works with the related comments in order to highlight the scientific contribution and the philological method adopted by Vettori. To all this is added the study of the Prolusions pronounced by Vettori at the Studium florentinum.

The field of political theology in the Orthodox traditions of Europe in post-Byzantine times is an almost unknown area. The book offers a comparison of four mirrors for princes from the beginning of the sixteenth century: The Teachings of Neagoe Basarab to His Son Theodosius (1520), Institutio Principis Christiani of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1516), On Secular Authority of Martin Luther (1523) and The Prince of Niccolò Machiavelli (1513). The author thus provides a cross-section of the history of Christian discourse concerning the concept of ‘Princeps Christianus’ in Europe. These works are representative because they show relevant confessional interpretations in Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Lutheranism. The main focus is on Neagoe Basarab, Lord of Wallachia between 1512 and 1521. This important author from Orthodox Europe is here brought into conversation with his three famous contemporaries on such topics as humanity, religion, politics, state, subjects, rulers and freedom.

CONTENTS: Introduction: Beyond Concepts – Neagoe Basarab: A Christian Prince in the Early Sixteenth Century – Erasmus of Rotterdam and His Education of a Christian Prince: On the Ethical Theomimesis of the Christian Prince – On Secular Authority: Martin Luther and the Prince as Servant – Rule and Method: Machiavelli’s Prince and the Dispensable Semantics of Christianitas – Conclusion: Beyond Concepts, in the Thick of Semantics.

While the reception of Augustine in the Late Middle Ages has attracted increasing scholarly attention in the last years, its fortune in the Italian Quattrocento still needs to be properly researched. This contribution focuses ona particular case of “Augustinianism” in fifteenth-century Italy, namely two liturgical offices for St. Augustine produced by the Italian humanist MaffeoVegio (1407-1458) and transmitted under the title De vita et officio beati Augustini. The article provides a detailed analysis and critical edition of these offices. The edition of these texts, extant in three manuscripts, further allow sus to approach the genre of the liturgical historiae in the Renaissance, texts which have often been neglected by earlier scholars, despite their central role in the devotional practices of that time.

After 1530, when Charles V granted the Maltese Archipelago to the Order of Saint John as the last outpost of Christianity, there took place the ambitious project of the new capital, Valletta. The relations existing between the Grand Masters of the Order of Saint John, the popes, and the Italian princes to the end of Cinquecento concurred to the invention of a city mirroring the Christian power in the Mediterranean Sea. Through original correspondence and related sources, this paper sheds light on the political network among Cosimo I de’ Medici, the Grand Masters, and other protagonists, which led to the significant contribution of the greatest military engineers and the financing strategies for the construction of Valletta.

Durante la prima età moderna, il dialogo tra cultura architettonica e umanesimo si attua con forme e strumenti diversi. I letterati diventano interlocutori di architetti e committenti, li aiutano nella scelta dei modelli antichi, e ne guidano l'interpretazione dei testi classici.
Grazie alle discussioni, agli scambi di libri e alle corrispondenze epistolari, le loro idee circolano in una geografia fluida, oltrepassando i confini della singola città. Attraverso l’indagine di fonti diverse, spesso poco conosciute, questo seminario analizza il rapporto tra arte del costruire e erudizione letteraria alla corte degli Estensi durante il primo Cinquecento, con l’obiettivo di comprendere fino a che punto l’umanesimo abbia determinato alcuni aspetti materiali dell’architettura.

https://www.biblhertz.it/events/2631954?speaker=Francesca+Mattei

This essay seeks to show that early modern women paid serious attention to the artistic category of erotic myths. Be they queens or prostitutes, engravers or poets, Mennonites or English Catholics, women often took command of the use and display of such imagery. Some did so through suppression, consciously avoiding spaces where these images were kept and insisting that their nude parts be covered. Others did so through positive reinforcement, whether by commissioning and collecting them, or by using the paintbrush to create their own depictions of erotic myths.

Il saggio affronta il tema degli indirizzi educativi e di istruzione sviluppati presso le élites intellettuali al servizio del principe nel tardo Quattrocento, valutando in particolare l’apertura, espressa dagli uomini di cultura che operarono nel sistema di governo e nella corte dei duchi di Savoia, verso aspetti pedagogici di orientamento umanistico da adottare nella formazione dei propri figli, destinati a seguire le carriere paterne come consiglieri ducali, officiales e talvolta docenti universitari. Il tema è principalmente approfondito attraverso la strategia educativa messa in atto per Scipione Cara dal padre Pietro, letterato e consigliere ducale di primissimo piano, il quale affidò l’educazione del figlio al maestro di retorica e umanista Ubertino Clerico, autore di una lunga epistola Exortatio ad virtutem indirizzata all’allievo Scipione.
This essay focuses on the reception of humanistic pedagogy in the education of intellectual élites in the late fifteenth century. The complex theme is investigated through a case study, i.e. the education of Scipione, son of Pietro Cara, an important jurist who was active at the Studium of Turin and at the court of the Savoy. Scipione Cara studied in the school of the humanist Ubertino Clerico, who dedicated the paraenetic epistle Exhortatio ad virtutem to him.

The article discusses the Song (cansó, canzone, canción, canção) as a genre within a historical framework. This task demands an approach from Rhetorics, as well as from Theory and History of written media, and Literary History. Through the comparison of tornadas or commiati in a chronological order, we can see how this structure progressively acquires the role of stabilizing a moral content rhetorically suitable to the genre, and how this orientation towards ‘textual semantics’ is later displaced and leads to the undermining of that moral purport, thus making the tornada a specific index to the historical pragmatics of poetry writing. In the last part, this article focus mainly on Luís de Camões’ tornadas, especially the way how his Songs enact this displacement.

Keywords: Canção. Literary History. Camonian Studies.

RESUMEN En contraposición a la visión historiográfica que hizo de los primeros emperadores Habsburgo unos gobernantes excéntricos y quijotescos que fracasaron en sus ambiciosos proyectos políti-cos, la investigación en profundidad de su pensamiento político y su mecenazgo cultural pone al descubierto una gran estrategia dinástica en los tiempos largos que combinó hábilmente políticas de reputación sapiencial y alianzas matrimoniales para construir a partir de una base territorial inicial extraordinariamente pobre en recursos un proyecto imperial universal único en la historia occidental. SUMMARY Against a historiographical tradition which portrayed the first Habsburg emperors as eccentric and quixotic rulers who failed in their ambitious political enterprises, deep research on their political thought and patronage of learning shows up a great dynastic strategy in the longue durée which skillfully combined politics of sapiential prestige and marriage alliances in order to build a unique universal imperial project from a very poor territorial background.

This article focuses on the centrality provided to auctores and texts as corpora, in the framework of Francesco Petrarca and the theory of imitation by the humanists. Initially, animal images from Petrarca and the humanists are analysed, as well as the paths of their diffusion. These were used to express the role of the model, the involvement of the writer, variatio, the election of stilus, and the questions sustained by the new routes of interaction with Cicero. Then, three main methodological ways to study the relationship between texts as corpora are presented: semiosphere, intertextuality, and reception theory. A critic point of view towards the static methodologies is here expressed. Conclusively, the dialogue between Petrarca and Cicero, as text and corpus, is recalled in order to incorporate the auctores contamination.