| Saggi e testimonianze | |
| Antonio Moreno Hernández – Jesús López Zamora, La tradición manuscrita e impresa de la Homeri Ilias de Nicolaus de Valle | 3 |
| Abstract. – Since the 14th century, several illustrious scholars had tried to translate the Homeric poem into Latin (e.g., Leontius Pilatus); despite these attempts, Nicolaus de Valle (1444-1473) was the first humanist who faced the challenge of translating the entire text of Ilias into Virgilian hexameter. In 1474, the editio princeps of the unfinished Latin translation of De Valle’s Iliad (books 3-5, 13, 18-20, 22-24) was published (Rome, Johannes Philippus de Lignamine). This study provides a complete census of the handwritten and printed tradition of the work as well as the first critical analysis carried out since the principles of the Classical Stemmatics. | |
| Francesco Molinarolo, Il motore dell’universo. Questioni di predicabilità e causalità divine nel Cinquecento aristotelico | 53 |
| Abstract. – This paper aims to discuss several examples belonging to the 16th-century Aristotelian tradition, regarding how God can be conceived and theorized as a cause towards the world. The dilemma arises from the distinction between final cause and efficient cause, where the former seems to be more respectful of the philosophy of Aristotle himself, and the latter more appropriate to the God of religion. The problem also involves the attribution to God of predicates which He shares with the transient world, such as ens, and brings to a necessary investigation of the ontological relationship between the world, both sublunary and heavenly, and the First Principle as either its producer or its mover. Analyzing the positions of several illustrious Aristotelian philosophers of the time, this paper suggests that the will to be adherent to Aristotle’s thought tends to lead towards a necessitaristic evaluation of God’s operations and consequently of natural phenomena. | |
| Mark Jurdjevic, Governments of the few in Renaissance Florence: Machiavelli’s impact on Guicciardini’s Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze | 83 |
| Abstract. – This article examines the friendship between Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini and its impact on Guicciardini’s political and historical thought. It investigates the transition in Guicciardini’s political thought from his early praise of the merits of aristocratic rule, expressed both with specific reference to the Albizzi regime that ruled Florence in the early fifteenth century and as an ideal type, to his sustained critique of governments of the few in his later Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze. It argues that Guicciardini’s later critique of regimes of the few and of the Albizzi oligarchy in particular reflects a specifically Machiavellian influence and reveals that Guicciardini’s later political thought directly and sympathetically addressed Machiavelli’s populism. In doing so, it reveals new aspects of the establishment reception of Machiavelli during his lifetime. | |
| Marco Incognito, Lessico tragico nelle Novelle di Matteo Bandello | 121 |
| Abstract. – The essay presents a short linguistic and rhetorical examination of the modalities of tragic representation used by Matteo Bandello in his Novelle. The analysis develops following a lexicological perspective mainly focused on two fundamental, though opposite, concepts: together they shape the semantic core from which the whole speech derives. On one hand is the feritas, the ferocity that overwhelms humaneness as an irrepressible passion and instinctive drive to excess, where the tragic event can take place. On the other hand is the pietas, the compassion, the sympathetic participatory inclination, simply pity towards those who suffer, and the only disposition for salvation and conservation of those ideals of humanitas and wisdom, which are constantly perceived as elusive, but always loyally pursued by the author in his short stories. | |
| Michele Ciliberto, Su Bruno (e Weber). Due parentesi e una ‘traduzione’ | 143 |
| Abstract. – This essay aims to illustrate how apparently marginal textual elements could become the keystone to understanding the thought of an author. It is the case of the rewriting – not a translation – of Latin hermetic Asclepius in Giordano Bruno’s Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, published in London in 1584, and of the presence of two brackets in a piece of Bruno’s dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies, published in London in 1585, which is explained considering 16th-century editorial practice and the English religious and political situation | |
| Testi e commenti | |
| Veronica Albi, Le emendazioni alla terza decade di Livio proposte dall’umanista Bartolomeo Fonzio | 173 |
| Abstract. – This article completes Concetto Marchesi’s partial pubblication of Bartolomeo Fonzio’s emendations to Livy’s third decade, providing the complete edition of Fonzio’s corrections noticed in ms. Riccardiano 1172 1. It also supplies several observations about the philological production of the 15th century, reflecting on Fonzio’s method and assuming his knowledge of Valla’s Emendationes | |
| Veronica Copello, «Locum gerit et tenet authoritate»: il volto politico di Vittoria Colonna fra lettere e documenti inediti | 237 |
| Abstract. – Thanks to the discovery of several unpublished documents, it has been possible to reconstruct three of the historical scenarios in which Vittoria Colonna played an important role, showing the authority of her political voice. And yet, in the daily administration of her lands and of national and international political affairs, there arose in her the intimate need for a «cara solitudine» (‘dear solitude’) and a «spiritual conversatione» «con i libri e coi pensieri» (‘spiritual conversation’ ‘with books and thoughts’). This dialectic between otium and negotium expresses distinctive features of the figure of Vittoria Colonna. | |
| Note e varietà | |
| Erika Nuti, Il libro II della Grammatica di Costantino Lascaris, ovvero come costruire un manuale di sintassi greca di successo nel primo Rinascimento | 285 |
| Abstract. – Constantin Lascaris’s verbal syntax has received scarce consideration among modern scholars. Nevertheless, an attentive enquiry of several manuscripts containing a 16th-century unedited coursebook for Western students of Greek suggests that Lascaris’s verbal syntax enjoyed considerable good fortune in Italy during the Cinquecento. In order to explain its success among both Greek and Western humble yet learned teachers of elementary Greek in the Italian Renaissance, this paper presents a detailed analysis of the structure and sources of the second book of Lascaris’ grammar, thus shedding light both on Lascaris’ methodology of writing grammatical subsidia and the use of Latin school texts to create useful Greek manuals in the schools of the Renaissance. | |
| Stefano Pezzè, Le alterne fortune della chiromanzia nel Rinascimento. Appunti su un capitolo di aristotelismo eterodosso | 321 |
| Abstract. – This paper provides new material that sheds light on the theme of chiromancy during the Renaissance. Far from being regarded with today’s scepticism, chiromancy was a form of divination regularly practised by physicians, debated in universities, and requested by men of power. Beginning with a description of the poor state-of-the-art regarding this matter, even including cases of mistaken identity, the paper presents the results of the first survey on this theme. The origin of divination through hand-reading and the Renaissance fortune of pseudo-Aristotelian treatises on chiromancy and physiognomy are tackled, as well as a presentation of the main figures involved in the debate: Alessandro Achillini, Girolamo Manfredi, Bartolomeo della Rocca ‘Cocles’, Andrea Corvo, Antioco Tiberti, Patrizio Tricasso. Finally, the paper explores the great success of chiromancy between the 15th and the 16th century and its survival after Church censorship, and forecasts a future census of chiromantic texts. | |
| Matteo Soranzo, Giovanni Aurelio Augurello. Alchimista, poeta, àugure | 335 |
| Abstract. – Based on an examination of the text, its sources and its context, this essay offers an interpretation of Giovanni Aurelio Augurello’s Chrysopoeia (Venice 1515). A didactic poem in Latin hexameters describing the making of the Philosophers’ Stone, Chrysopoeia synchronizes the alchemical opus with actual historical events. In doing so, the poem revisits the late medieval interplay of alchemy and prophecy found in the writings of John of Rupescissa and Pietro Bono of Ferrara in a dialogue with Marsilio Ficino and other late Quattrocento interpreters of the myth of the Golden Age. | |
| Alessandra Mantovani, Tra Cicerone ed Erasmo. ‘Sapientia’ ed ‘eloquentia’ nella Defensio di Giovanni Battista Goineo (Bologna, 1537) | 357 |
| Abstract. – The Defensio pro Romuli Amasaei auditoribus adversus Sebastiani Corradi calumnias (1537) is a pamphlet with which Giovanni Battista Goineo, physician and humanist, undertakes to defend both his Bolognese magister Romolo Amaseo and his fellow disciples accused of Ciceronian formalism by the humanist and philologist Sebastiano Corradi. Goineo’s actual intentions become evident if traced back to the cultural and religious ferments widespread throughout the city environment, crossed by the spiritual concerns which also affected the university and its scholars, from Amaseo to Achille Bocchi. At the centre of the text we can read the story, attributed to Gianfrancesco Pico, of a dialogue between his uncle Giovanni and Angelo Poliziano, where Goineo reaffirms the ideal of an Erasmian-inspired culture in which humanistic values and religious experience come together. This culture he argues is well represented by Romolo Amaseo’s disciples, among whom he mentions some of the most illustrious representatives of the pre-conciliar evangelism, from Reginald Pole to Ludovico Beccadelli. | |
| Paolo Vanini, Sospendere il Nuovo Mondo: Montaigne, lo scetticismo e i cannibali | 387 |
| Abstract. – This paper examines the relationship between skepticism and imagination in Montaigne’s portrait of the cannibals in the New World. To refute the unreliable story told by the European conquerors (that cannibals are inhuman beasts to be enslaved), Montaigne elaborates a literary dissimulation that advocates the opposite thesis: anthropophagy is a religious ritual defining a society of loyal warriors and rational beings. As a jurist and a philosopher, Montaigne interprets the connection between «testimony» and «experience» to prove that the «fabulous testimonies» are legitimate instruments for understanding the dialectic between truth and possibility. In the first part, we will see that this claim is rooted in Montaigne’s criticism of Medicine and Jurisprudence. In the second part, we will focus on his «fabulous portrait» of the anthropophagic ritual by showing that it represents a carnivalesque overturning of the Eucharist. This symbolic reversal between cannibals and Christians allows Montaigne to skeptically destabilize the dichotomy barbarism-civilization in order to reinterpret the relationship between nature, culture and imagination. | |
| Tommaso De Robertis, Odysseus goes to Florence. Notes on the first Italian translation of Homer’s Odyssey (1582) | 421 |
| Abstract. – This article provides a preliminary textual and contextual study of the earliest Italian translation of Homer’s Odyssey, produced by Girolamo Baccelli (c. 1514-c. 1580) and published in Florence by Bartolomeo Sermartelli in 1582. The article is divided into two parts. The first discusses the production of Baccelli’s work. It provides a comparison between the autograph manuscript of his translation and the printed version, and sets his project against the background of the «questione della lingua» and the rise in Florence of the Accademia Fiorentina. The second part offers an analysis of specific sections of the text in comparison with the work of other 16th-century Italian translators of Homer, shedding light on Baccelli’s linguistic and poetic strategies. | |
| Cristiano Ragni, «O wrathful France». Il Lucano di Marlowe e le guerre di religione | 445 |
| Abstract. – Marlowe’s translations from Ovid and Lucan have always been considered inferior productions, despite being the favourite means, in early modern England, to compete with the prestigious classical and continental models, and to address contemporary anxieties obliquely. In this article, I will focus on Marlowe’s translation of Book I of Lucan’s Bellum Civile – the first rendering in English of this significant Latin poem – and highlight how Marlowe’s decision to translate it had much to do with the main theme of the epos – civil war. By exploring some of his translational choices, I will shed light on the likely connections between this rather unacknowledged work and the widespread pamphlets on the contemporary French wars of religion, and thus underscore the writer’s (not-so-subtle) willingness to condemn all civil wars. | |
| Variazioni | |
| Giovanna Murano, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola lettore dell’Expositio super libros Ethicorum di Donato Acciaiuoli (ms. Firenze, BNC, Conv. Soppr. J.III.26) | 475 |
| Abstract. – This article investigates the ms. Florence, Bibl. Nazionale Centrale, Conv. soppr. J.III.26, a copy of the Expositio super libros Ethicorum of the humanist and politician Donato Acciaiuoli (1428-1478). The manuscript, which once belonged to the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, presents few marginal notes and signs by the hand of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The first part of the article focuses on the transmission of the Expositio from the reportatio of the teaching of John Argyropoulos (still preserved in the ms. Florence, Bibl. Nazionale Centrale, II.I.104) to the printed edition realized in Florence in the Dominican convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli between August 1477 and the beginning of January 1478. | |
| Francesco Rustici, Sopra alcuni alterati in -uzzo delle Storie fiorentine di Francesco Guicciardini | 495 |
| Abstract. – The Storie fiorentine were composed by Francesco Guicciardini between 1508 and 1509 and are his first historiographical text. The chronological period considered here extends from the Ciompi revolt (1378) to the reconquest of Pisa by Florence (1509). The text is characterized by a remarkable linguistic vivacity, especially in the use of popular expressiveness and speech modules. The article analyzes the appearance of some altered nouns in -uzzo that create, through their colloquial marking, an evaluative meaning. The communicative function of lexical expressiveness can be considered as an additional historiographic tool available to the author. | |
| Enrico Fenzi, Giovanni Parenti e la poesia latina del Rinascimento | 511 |
| Abstract. – Below is a review of the important work by Giovanni Parenti, Poeti latini del Cinquecento, henceforth an indispensable reference point for any future study. Initially planned for the three volumes of the Poeti del Cinquecento in the Ricciardi series, it then developed independently: it decreased from forty authors to be anthologized to sixteen, while the space granted to each of them increased. Parenti worked on the anthology for more than ten years, from 1988 to June 1999: the scholar’s death, which occurred in 2000 at the age of 53, interrupted a work that promised to be even more extensive and that would probably have reduced some imbalance between the parts. The whole story of the undertaking is told in an introduction by Massimo Danzi, who with admirable care and passion took on the material left by Parenti. The work is gone over, attempting to highlight its seductive beauty and its importance in presenting once again such a rich and vital heritage of our culture and restoring it to our experience of poetry. | |
| Indice dei manoscritti | 527 |
| Indice dei nomi | 531 |
Rivista dell'Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento – Firenze