I Tatti Renaissance Library – serie

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.

The first complete English translation of a controversial Renaissance debate centering moral questions on power and leadership.Poggio Bracciolini was a prominent scholar-official of the early Renaissance and a leading representative of Florentine humanism. He was employed as a secretary to seven popes and ended his career as Chancellor of the Republic of Florence. On Leaders and Tyrants contains texts, the majority by Poggio, relating to a controversy on the relative merits of the lives and deeds of Scipio Africanus and Julius Caesar. The debate addressed the nature of tyranny and military glory, as well as the qualities necessary for republican leaders, such as Stoic virtue, lawfulness, and good citizenship. Poggio’s primary opponent was the educator Guarino of Verona, a humanist in the service of the duke of Ferrara. The psychology of power, the demands placed on public servants, and the dividing line between leadership and tyranny are as topical today as they were when Poggio wrote. This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin texts and the first complete translation of the controversy into English.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. The publication of his Latin translations of the dialogues in 1484 was an intellectual event of the first magnitude, making the Platonic canon accessible to western Europe after the passing of a millennium and establishing Plato as an authority for Renaissance thought.This volume contains Ficino’s extended analysis and commentary on the Phaedrus, which he explicates as a meditation on “beauty in all its forms” and a sublime work of theology. In the commentary on the Ion, Ficino explores a poetics of divine inspiration that leads to the Neoplatonist portrayal of the soul as a rhapsode whose song is an ascent into the mind of God. Both works bear witness to Ficino’s attempt to revive a Christian Platonism and what might be called an Orphic Christianity.

After the composition of the Decameron, and under the influence of Petrarch’s humanism, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is Famous Women, the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women.The 106 women whose life stories make up this volume range from the exemplary to the notorious, from historical and mythological figures to Renaissance contemporaries. In the hands of a master storyteller, these brief biographies afford a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential.Famous Women, which Boccaccio continued to revise and expand until the end of his life, became one of the most popular works in the last age of the manuscript book, and had a signal influence on many literary works, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Castiglione’s Courtier. This edition presents the first English translation based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin.

Early Renaissance humanists discovered the culture of ancient Greece and Rome mostly through the study of classical manuscripts. Cyriac of Ancona (Ciriaco de' Pizzecolli, 1391-1452), a merchant and diplomat as well as a scholar, was among the first to study the physical remains of the ancient world in person and for that reason is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. His travel diaries and letters are filled with descriptions of classical sites, drawings of buildings and statues, and copies of hundreds of Latin and Greek inscriptions. Cyriac came to see it as his calling to record the current state of the remains of antiquity and to lobby with local authorities for their preservation, recognizing that archaeological evidence was an irreplaceable complement to the written record.This volume presents letters and diaries from 1443 to 1449, the period of his final voyages, which took him from Italy to the eastern shore of the Adriatic, the Greek mainland, the Aegean islands, Anatolia and Thrace, Mount Athos, Constantinople, the Cyclades, and Crete. Cyriac's accounts of his travels, with their commentary reflecting his wide-ranging antiquarian, political, religious, and commercial interests, provide a fascinating record of the encounter of the Renaissance world with the legacy of classical antiquity. The Latin texts assembled for this edition have been newly edited and most of them appear here for the first time in English. The edition is enhanced with reproductions of Cyriac's sketches and a map of his travels.

The cycle of disciplines now known as the humanities emerged in their modern form during the Italian Renaissance as the result of an educational movement begun by humanist teachers, writers, and scholars of the early Quattrocento. The movement argued for the usefulness of classical literature as an instrument for training young men and women, not only in the arts of language and eloquence, but also in civic virtue and practical wisdom. This volume contains four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists’ efforts to reform medieval education.The four texts are Pier Paolo Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth”; Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature”; Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), “The Education of Boys”; and Battista Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning.” The Vergerio and Guarino texts appear in English for the first time.

The Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (1470-1555) was born in Urbino but spent most of his life in early Tudor England. His most popular work, On Discovery (De inventoribus rerum, 1499), was the first comprehensive account of discoveries and inventions written since antiquity. Thirty Latin editions of this work were published in Polydore's lifetime, and by the eighteenth century more than a hundred editions had appeared in eight languages, including Russian. On Discovery became a key reference for anyone who wanted to know about "firsts" in theology, philosophy, science, technology, literature, language, law, material culture, and other fields. Polydore took his information from dozens of Greek, Roman, biblical, and Patristic authorities. His main point was to show that many Greek and Roman claims for discovery were false and that ancient Jews or other Asian peoples had priority. This is the first English translation of a critical edition based on the Latin texts published in Polydore Vergil's lifetime.

The Renaissance recovery of ancient biographical writers such as Plutarch, Suetonius, and Jerome led to a wave of imitations by Renaissance authors from Petrarch to Machiavelli. The orator, diplomat, and statesman Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459), an expert in Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, was among the leading humanist biographers of the Renaissance. This collection brings together his famous biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which helped establish the canon of Italian literature, as well as his parallel lives of Socrates and Seneca, which remained the standard biographical sources for those philosophers throughout the early modern period. It also includes extended excerpts from two works, On Famous Men of Great Age and Against the Jews and the Gentiles, which contain biographical entries on a range of Italian literary figures from Brunetto Latini and Guido Cavalcanti to Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni.

The five comedies included in this volume, three of which have never been translated into English, present a characteristic sampling of comic form as it was interpreted by some of the most important Latin humanists of the Quattrocento. Pier Paolo Vergerio's Paulus (ca. 1390), Philodoxeos fabula (1424) by Leon Battista Alberti, Philogenia et Epiphebus (ca. 1440) by Ugolino Pisani, Chrysis (1444) by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), and Tommaso Medio's Epirota (1483) span nearly the entire period and are a valuable gauge of its changing literary tastes, tastes nourished by the ancient comic drama of Plautus and Terence. While the earliest of the humanist comedies seem almost medieval in their moralism, the didacticism of the pulpit is cleverly seasoned with the unabashed realism of the brothel to produce a mixture that looks forward to the more modern, sophisticated comedies written in the vernacular during the Cinquecento.

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1426–1503) was an important humanist and scholar of Renaissance Italy, the presiding spirit of the Accademia Pontaniana, and chief minister and tutor to the Aragonese Kings of Naples. He was also the most innovative and versatile Latin poet of Quattrocento Italy. His Two Books of Hendecasyllables, given the subtitle Baiae by their first editor Pietro Summonte, experiment brilliantly with the metrical form associated principally with the ancient Latin poet Catullus. The poems are the elegant offspring of Pontano’s leisure, written to celebrate love, good wine, friendship, nature, and all the pleasures of life to be found at the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples. They are translated here for the first time into English.

Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was the most important theorist of the humanist movement. He wrote a major work on Latin style, On Elegance in the Latin Language, which became a battle-standard in the struggle for the reform of Latin across Europe, and Dialectical Disputations, a wide-ranging attack on scholastic logic. His most famous work is On the Donation of Constantine, an oration in which Valla uses new philological methods to attack the authenticity of the most important document justifying the papacy's claims to temporal rule. It appears here in a new translation with introduction and notes by G. W. Bowersock, based on the critical text of Wolfram Setz (1976). This volume also includes a text and translation of the Constitutum Constantini, commonly known as the Donation of Constantine.

Bartolomeo Platina (1421–1481), historian, political theorist, and author of a best-selling cookbook, began life as a mercenary soldier and ended it as the head of the Vatican Library. A papal official under the humanist Pope Pius II, he was a member of the humanist academies of Cardinal Bessarion and Pomponio Leto, and was twice imprisoned for conspiring against Pope Paul II. Returning to favor under Pope Sixtus IV, he composed his most famous work, a biographical compendium of the Roman popes from St. Peter down to his own time. The work critically synthesized a wide range of sources and became the standard reference work on papal history for early modern Europe, reprinted dozens of times and translated into a number of languages. A characteristic work of Renaissance humanism, it used Christian antiquity as a standard against which to criticize modern churchmen. This edition contains the first complete translation into English and an improved Latin text. Volume 1, the first of a projected four, covers the period from the founding of the church through ad 461.

Teofilo Folengo (1491–1544) was born in Mantua and joined the Benedictine order, but became a runaway monk and a satirist of monasticism. In 1517 he published, under the pseudonym Merlin Cocaio, the first version of his macaronic narrative poem Baldo, later enlarged and elaborated. It blended Latin with various Italian dialects in hexameter verse, inventing a deliberately droll language whose humor depends on the mixture of high and low tonalities. An important example of the mock-heroic epic, the work was a model for Rabelais and was frequently reprinted. Baldo, the hero of these picaresque adventures, is a descendant of French royalty who starts out as something of a juvenile delinquent. The poem narrates episodes that include imprisonment; battles with local authorities, pirates, shepherds, witches, and demons; and a journey to the underworld. Throughout Baldo is accompanied by various companions, among them a giant, a centaur, a magician, and his best friend Cingar, a wickedly inventive trickster (“practicus ad beffas”). This edition provides the first English translation of this hilarious send-up of ancient epic and Renaissance chivalric romance.

Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance, is best known today for his Platonizing commentaries on Dante and Vergil. His most substantial work of poetry was his Three Books on Xandra, written while still a young man. They consist primarily of love poetry in Latin directed to his lady-love Alessandra, but they also chronicle his life, friendships, literary studies, and the patronage of his work by Piero de' Medici. Inspired equally by the ancient Roman love-elegy and by Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the poems illustrate the mingling of classical and vernacular traditions characteristic of the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Also included in this volume is the Carmina Varia, a collection whose centerpiece is a group of elegies directed to the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo. These bring to life the Platonic passion Bembo conceived for Ginevra de’Benci, later the subject of a famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci. This edition contains the first translation of both works into English.

Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530), considered by some authorities the finest Neo-Latin poet of the Italian Renaissance, spent most of his career in Naples, where he was a member and ultimately the head of the Accademia Pontaniana. He is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Virgil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form, as well as elegies, epigrams, and a number of shorter works.This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.

An Open Letters Review Best Book of the YearAngelo Poliziano (1454–1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance and the leading literary figure of Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “il Magnifico.” The poet’s Miscellanies, including a “first century” published in 1489 and a “second century” unfinished at his death, constitute the most innovative contribution to classical philology of the Renaissance. Each chapter is a mini-essay on some lexical or textual problem which Poliziano, drawing on the riches of the Medici Library and Lorenzo’s collection of antiquities, solves with his characteristic mixture of deep learning, analytic skill, and brash criticism of his predecessors. Volume 1 presents a new Latin edition of The First Century of the Miscellanies, and these volumes together present the first translation of both collections into any modern language.

Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was the most important Latin poet of the fifteenth century as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Aragonese kings of Naples. His Dialogues are our best source for the humanist academy of Naples which Pontano led for several decades. They provide a vivid picture of literary life in the capital of the Aragonese seaborne empire, based in southern Italy and the Western Mediterranean. This first volume contains the two earliest of Pontano’s five dialogues. Charon, set in the underworld of classical mythology, illustrates humanist attitudes to a wide range of topics, satirizing the follies and superstitions of humanity. Antonius, a Menippean satire named for the founder of the Neapolitan Academy, Antonio Beccadelli, is set in the Portico Antoniano in downtown Naples, where the academicians commemorate and emulate their recently-deceased leader, conversing on favorite topics and stopping from time to time to interrogate passersby.This volume contains a freshly-edited Latin text of these dialogues and the first translation of them into English.

Written in the aftermath of the catastrophic sack of Rome in 1527, the historian Paolo Giovio’s dialogue provides an informed perspective on the event from an intimate friend of Pope Clement VII. The work is also remarkable for its discussions of literary style and the much-debated question whether the vernacular could rival or surpass Latin as a vehicle for literary expression. It discusses authors whom Giovio knew personally, such as Ariosto, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Sannazaro, and Vittoria Colonna. The dialogues also contain an extensive survey of Italian noblewomen, shedding new light on their careers and cultural achievements. This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin text and the first translation of the work into English.

Michael Marullus (c. 1453/4–1500), born in Greece, began life as a mercenary soldier but became a prominent Neo-Latin poet and scholar who worked in Florence and Naples. He married the beautiful and learned Alessandra Scala, daughter of the humanist Bartolomeo Scala, chancellor of Florence, and his Epigrams bring alive the circle of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici. Among Marullus’ influences were ancient Greek texts such as the Homeric and Orphic hymns, the Corpus Hermeticum, the hymns of Proclus, Cleanthes, and Callimachus, and Julian the Apostate’s Hymn to the Sun. Marullus was particularly important, however, as one of the first Renaissance poets to imitate the works of Lucretius, and one witness reported that, after his death by drowning, a copy of the Roman poet’s works was found in his saddlebag. Later poets imitated him in vernacular love poetry, especially Ronsard; he even appears as a shadowy figure in the pages of George Eliot’s Romola, where he is depicted as a confirmed pagan.This edition contains Marullus’ complete Latin poetry. All of these works appear in English translation for the first time.

Humanist Tragedies, like its companion volume Humanist Comedies (ITRL 19), contains a representative sampling of Latin drama written during the Tre- and Quattrocento. The five tragedies included in this volume—Albertino Mussato’s Ecerinis (1314), Antonio Loschi’s Achilleis (ca. 1387), Gregorio Corraro’s Progne (ca. 1429), Leonardo Dati’s Hyempsal (ca. 1442), and Marcellino Verardi’s Fernandus servatus (1493)—were nourished by a potent amalgam of classical, medieval, and pre-humanist sources.Just as Latin humanist comedy depended heavily upon Plautus and Terence, humanist tragedy drew its inspiration primarily from the nine plays of Seneca. Dramatists also used ancient legends or contemporary history as source material, dramatizing them as Seneca might have done. Some even attempted to outdo Seneca, exaggerating the bloody sensationalism, the bombastic rhetoric, and the insistence on retributive justice for which he was famous.Unlike comedy, which drew its narratives from ordinary life and from love, sex, money, and manners, tragedy was not concerned with human foibles but with distant tragic heroes. The impossible choices faced by larger-than-life men and women whose heroic destinies hung in the balance gave tragedy a considerably shorter shelf-life than comedies. While comedy stayed relevant, tragedy became problematic, evolving into the hybrid genre of tragicomedy by the end of the Quattrocento. Humanist tragedy testifies to the momentous changes in literary and cultural conventions that occurred during the Renaissance.

Francesco Filelfo's philosophical dialogue On Exile (ca. 1440) depicts a prominent group of Florentine noblemen and humanists, driven from their city by Cosimo de’ Medici, discussing the sufferings imposed by exile such as poverty and loss of reputation, and the best way to endure and even profit from them. This volume contains the first complete edition of the Latin text and the first complete translation into any modern language.

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503) served five kings of Naples as a courtier, official, and diplomat, and earned even greater fame as a scholar, prose author, and poet. His Dialogues reflect his diverse interests in religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as in everyday life in fifteenth-century Naples. They are especially important for their vivid picture of the contemporary gatherings of Pontano and his friends in the humanist academy over which he presided from around 1471 until shortly before his death.Volume 2 includes the Actius, named for one of its principal speakers, the great Neo-Latin poet Jacopo Sannazaro, and contains a perceptive treatment of poetic rhythm, the first full treatment of the Latin hexameter in the history of philology. The dialogue continues with a discussion of style and method in history writing, a landmark in the history of historiography. This is a new critical edition of the Actius and the first translation of this dialogue into English.

An Open Letters Review Best Book of the YearAngelo Poliziano (1454–1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance and the leading literary figure of Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, “il Magnifico.” The poet’s Miscellanies, including a “first century” published in 1489 and a “second century” unfinished at his death, constitute the most innovative contribution to classical philology of the Renaissance. Each chapter is a mini-essay on some lexical or textual problem which Poliziano, drawing on the riches of the Medici Library and Lorenzo’s collection of antiquities, solves with his characteristic mixture of deep learning, analytic skill, and brash criticism of his predecessors. Volume 1 presents a new Latin edition of The First Century of the Miscellanies, and these volumes together present the first translation of both collections into any modern language.

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503) served five kings of Naples as a courtier, official, and diplomat, and earned even greater fame as a scholar, prose author, and poet. His Dialogues reflect his diverse interests in religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as in everyday life in fifteenth-century Naples. They are especially important for their vivid picture of the contemporary gatherings of Pontano and his friends in the humanist academy over which he presided from around 1471 until shortly before his death.This volume completes the I Tatti edition of Pontano’s five surviving dialogues and features both Aegidius and Asinus. The conversation in Aegidius, named for the Augustinian theologian Giles of Viterbo, ranges over various topics, including creation, dreams, free will, the immortality of the soul, the relation between heaven and earth, language, astrology, and mysticism. The Asinus is less a dialogue than a fantastical autobiographical comedy in which Pontano himself is represented as having gone mad and fallen in love with an ass. This is the first translation of these dialogues into English.

A renowned Renaissance poet’s homage to Naples makes its debut in modern English translation.Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Aragonese kings of southern Italy. The dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, Pontano produced literary works in several genres and was the leader of the Neapolitan academy. The two works included in the present volume, broadly inspired by Virgil, might be considered Pontano’s love songs to the landscapes of Naples. The Eclogues offer a spectacular, panoramic tour of the Bay of Naples region, even as they focus on intimate domestic scenes and allegorize the people and places of the poet’s world. The Garden of the Hesperides is a work of brilliant erudition on an unprecedented poetic topic: the cultivation of citrus trees and the splendid pleasures of gardens. This volume features a newly established Latin text of the Garden of the Hesperides as well as the first published translations of both works into English.

Giovanni Marrasio (d. 1452), a humanist poet from Noto in Sicily, spent the major part of his poetic career in Siena and Ferrara before returning to Palermo in the role of a medical doctor serving the University of Palermo. In Siena, Naples, and Palermo he hovered on the edge of the courts of the Este and of Alfonso “the Magnanimous” of Aragon without ever winning the title of court poet he coveted.Marrasio was esteemed in the Renaissance as the first to revive the ancient Latin elegy, and his Angelinetum, or “Angelina’s Garden,” as well as his later poems (Carmina Varia) explore that genre in all its variety, from love poetry, to a description of a court masque, to political panegyric, to poetic exchanges with famous humanists of the day such as Leonardo Bruni, Maffeo Vegio, Antonio Panormita, and Enea Silvio Piccolomini. This volume contains the first translation of Marrasio’s works into any modern language.

Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452) was among the first to study the physical remains of the ancient world in person and for that reason is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. This volume contains a life of Cyriac to the year 1435 by his friend Francesco Scalamonti, which relies on Cyriac’s own records, along with several letters to and from Cyriac, and other texts illustrating his early life. These include Cyriac’s letter-treatise in praise of Julius Caesar, countering the attacks on the founder of the Roman Empire made by Renaissance republicans. A number of the texts included have been freshly edited and translated for the first time in this volume.

Jacopo Zabarella's two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which sciences should be taught and the method to be followed in scientific demonstration that roiled the Late Renaissance world for decades. In these famous works Zabarella rejected the views of Ramists and modern Galenists in favor of the pure doctrine of Aristotle, freed from misunderstandings foisted upon it by medieval interpreters. The influence of these works on Galileo's scientific method and Descartes' famous Discourse on Method (1637) has long been debated. They are here translated into English for the first time, along with a new Latin text based on the corrected 1586 edition.Volume 1 contains On Methods, Books I-II. Volume 2 contains On Methods, Books III-IV, and On Regressus.