First Italian Reader

First Italian Reader

Author: Stanley Appelbaum

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-08-29

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 048612035X

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Beginning students of Italian language and literature will welcome these selections of poetry, fiction, history, and philosophy by 14th- to 20th-century authors, including Dante, Boccaccio, Pirandello, and 52 others.


Pietro Bembo

Pietro Bembo

Author: Carol Kidwell

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 9780773527096

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Carol Kidwell's lavishly illustrated book is the first full-length biography of Renaissance Cardinal Pietro Bembo. Her extensive use of translations from Bembo's 2,600 letters, including exchanges of love letters with Lucrezia Borgia, provides a picture of personal life in the brilliant, turbulent years of the Italian Renaissance. Bembo, a Venetian patrician and man of letters, had a close association with the printer Aldus. He enjoyed a rich life with illicit love affairs in the courts of Ferrara, Urbino, and finally Rome, where he was appointed Latin secretary to Leo X. Ten years later, ill and bored, Bembo left Rome for Padua with Morosina, the young sister of a Vatican courtesan. To guarantee a living he took vows of chastity, poverty and obedience in the aristocratic order of St John of Jerusalem, and then started a family. Bembo was active in education in Padua; and his great achievement was to have helped create a common language for Italy through the revival of medieval Tuscany in his poetry and prose. Appointed official historian of Venice, after Morosina's death he became a cardinal. An open mind, coupled with staunch support of the established church during the troubled years of the reformation, made him an asset to the papal curia. At the time of his accidental death in Rome in 1547 he was considered a likely successor to Paul III.


Italy and the Classical Tradition

Italy and the Classical Tradition

Author: Bloomsbury Publishing

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-10-16

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1472521374

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Italy's original fascination with its cultural origins in Greece and Rome first created what is now known as 'the Classical tradition' - the pervasive influence of ancient art and thought on later times. In response to a growing interest in Classical reception, this volume provides a timely reappraisal of the Greek and Roman legacies in Italian literary history. There are fresh insights on the early study of Greek and Latin texts in post-classical Italy and reassessments of the significance attached to ancient authors and ideas in the Renaissance, as well as some innovative interpretations of canonical Italian authors, including Dante, Petrarch and Alberti, in the light of their ancient influences and models. The wide range of essays in this volume - all by leading specialists - should appeal to anyone with an interest in Italian literature or the Classical tradition. Italy's early fascination with its Hellenic and Roman origins created what is now called 'the classical tradition'.This book focuses on the role of the Greek and Latin languages and texts in Italian humanist thought and Renaissance poetry: how ancient languages were mastered and used, and how ancient texts were acquired and appropriated. Fresh perspectives on the influences of Aristotle, Plutarch and Virgil accompany innovative interpretations of canonical Italian authors - including Dante, Petrarch and Alberti - in the light of their classical models. Treatments of more specialized forms of writing, such as the cento and commentary, and some opening chapters on linguistic history also prompt reassessment of Renaissance perceptions of both Greece and Rome in relation to early modern Latin and vernacular culture. The collection as a whole highlights the importance of Italy's unique legacy of antiquity for the history of ideas and philology, as well as for literary history. The essays in this volume, all by leading specialists, are supplemented by a detailed introduction and a subject bibliography.


The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy

Author: Dante Alighieri

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 0195087402

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Martinez and Durling's introduction and notes are designed with the first-time reader of the poem in mind but will be useful to others as well. The concise introduction presents essential biographical and historical background and a discussion of the form of the poem. The notes are more extensive than those in most translations currently available, and they contain much new material. In addition, sixteen short essays explore the autobiographical dimension of the poem, the problematic body analogy, the question of Christ's presence in Hell, and individual cantos that have been the subject of controversy, including those on homosexuality. There is an extensive bibliography, and the four indexes (to foreign words, passages cited, proper names in the notes, and to proper names in the text and translation) will make the volume particularly useful.


Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione

Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione

Author: Christine Raffini

Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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Marsilio Ficino's ideas on love, cosmology, the contemplative life, and the immortality of the soul transformed Europe, inspiring art and shaping attitudes for centuries to come. After examining his attempts to reconcile Christian authority with Renaissance individualism, this study shows how his synthesis of Platonic, Christian, and courtly love influenced the thought of two of his successors, Pietro Bembo and Baldassare Castiglione. While the former contributed in large measure to the spread of Petrarchism, which was steadily determining the style and tone of the best poetry of the age, the latter created a work of richness and complexity, which is seen as a representation of the Renaissance itself. Dr. Raffini's overview, meant to address a need among students of Renaissance literature, history, and art, succeeds as well in making these three innovative thinkers accessible and relevant to the general reader.


Plotting the Past

Plotting the Past

Author: Cristina Della Coletta

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781557530912

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Through an examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theoretical work and novels, Della Coletta presents an authoritatively original recasting of the notion of the historical novel. Della Coletta's analysis of these novels suggests that genres are ideological units molded by culture and history, and that current ideologies shape the literary representation of the historical past. This innovative case study thus illuminates not just the twentieth-century Italian historical novel but also the function of literary genres as a whole.


Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation

Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation

Author: Abigail Brundin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1317001052

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Vittoria Colonna was one of the best known and most highly celebrated female poets of the Italian Renaissance. Her work went through many editions during her lifetime, and she was widely considered by her contemporaries to be highly skilled in the art of constructing tightly controlled and beautifully modulated Petrarchan sonnets. In addition to her literary contacts, Colonna was also deeply involved with groups of reformers in Italy before the Council of Trent, an involvement which was to have a profound effect on her literary production. In this study, Abigail Brundin examines the manner in which Colonna's poetry came to fulfil, in a groundbreaking and unprecedented way, a reformed spiritual imperative, disseminating an evangelical message to a wide audience reading vernacular literature, and providing a model of spiritual verse which was to be adopted by later poets across the peninsula. She shows how, through careful management of an appropriate literary persona, Colonna's poetry was able to harness the power of print culture to extend its appeal to a much broader audience. In so doing this book manages to provide the vital link between the two central facets of Vittoria Colonna's production: her poetic evangelism, and her careful construction of a gendered identity within the literary culture of her age. The first full length study of Vittoria Colonna in English for a century, this book will be essential reading for scholars interested in issues of gender, literature, religious reform or the dynamics of cultural transmission in sixteenth-century Italy. It also provides an excellent background and contextualisation to anyone wishing to read Colonna's writings or to know more about her role as a mediator between the worlds of courtly Petrachism and religious reform.