This book is about philology and its relevance over time. The compilation foregrounds a multi-faceted field of research that has dealt with the relationship between language, literature and culture for over 2,000 years. The main thread of this volume, comprising ten scholarly essays, is to show that philology as an academic field and a scholarly perspective―understood in its widest sense as the profound understanding of language, literature and culture―does matter in the twenty-first century, that is to say, in our own time characterized by globalization and digitalization. The...

Re-evaluating the dialogue s place in the literary landscape of the Italian and French Renaissance, Speaking of Love presents the love dialogue at the intersection of a revival of the form and the period s philosophies of love and desire. Between 1540 and 1580, authors such as Speroni, Tullia d Aragona, the Venetian poligrafi, Tyard, Le Caron, Pasquier, Taillemont, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labe, feature interlocutors not only deliberating on love but imitating the experience of love in their dynamics of speaking. These love dialogues allow early modern ideologies and...

The Latin poet Ovid continues to fascinate readers today. In Italian Readers of Ovid from the Origins to Petrarch, Julie Van Peteghem examines what drew medieval Italian writers to the Latin poet’s works, characters, and themes. While accounts of Ovid’s influence in Italy often start with Dante’s Divine Comedy, this book shows that mentions of Ovid are found in some of the earliest poems written in Italian, and remain a constant feature of Italian poetry over time. By situating the poetry of the Sicilians, Dante, Cino da Pistoia, and Petrarch within the rich and diverse history of...

In Aging Gracefully in the Renaissance: Stories of Later Life from Petrarch to Montaigne Cynthia Skenazi explores a shift in attitudes towards aging and provides a historical perspective on a crucial problem of our time. From the late fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries, the elderly subject became a point of new social, medical, political, and literary attention on both sides of the Alps. A movement of secularization tended to dissociate old age from the Christian preparation for death, re-orienting the concept of aging around pragmatic matters such as health care,...

In Dante’s Prayerful Pilgrimage Alessandro Vettori provides a comprehensive analysis of prayer in Dante’s Commedia. The underlying thesis considers prayer a metaphorical pilgrimage toward a sacred location and connects it with the pilgrim’s ascent to the vision of the Trinity. Prayer is movement in Purgatorio and also in Paradiso, while eternal stasis is the penalty of blasphemous souls in Inferno. In the fictional rendition of the poem, the pilgrim’s itinerary becomes a specular reflection of Dante’s own exilic experience. Prayer’s human-divine interaction affords the poet the...

In Cristoforo Landino: His Works and Thought Bruce McNair examines the writings, lectures and orations of Landino (1424-98), Renaissance Florence’s famous teacher of poetry and rhetoric. McNair studies Landino’s lecture notes, public orations, poetry, philosophical works and most popular commentaries to show how Landino’s allegorical interpretations of Virgil and Dante grew in complexity as he studied philosophy and theology and how he understood Dante’s Commedia as completing and surpassing Virgil’s Aeneid. McNair also shows how Landino draws upon a wide range of thinkers such as...

In this work Craig Kallendorf argues that the printing press played a crucial, and previously unrecognized, role in the reception of the Roman poet Virgil in the Renaissance. Using a new methodology developed at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Printing Virgil shows that the press established which commentaries were disseminated, provided signals for how the Virgilian translations were to be interpreted, shaped the discussion about the authenticity of the minor poems attributed to Virgil, and inserted this material into larger censorship concerns. The editions that were printed during this...

From c. 1100 until c. 1170, Latin prosimetrical texts characterized by dialogue, allegory, and philosophical speculation enjoyed a notable popularity within the cultural ambit of the French cathedral schools. Inspired by Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, the prosimetrum writers applied his literary techniques to the ethical and anthropological concerns of their own era, producing texts of great artistry in the process. This book investigates the rise of the Boethian impulse in Latin, the innovations of the twelfth-century writers, the difficulties that arose when they attempted to...

The Anonymous Old English Homily: Sources, Composition, and Variation offers important essays on the origins, textual transmission, and (re)use of early English preaching texts between the ninth and the late twelfth centuries. Associated with the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English project, these studies provide fresh insights into one of the most complex textual genres of early medieval literature. Contributions deal with the definition of the anonymous homiletic corpus in Old English, the history of scholarship on its Latin sources, and the important unedited Pembroke and...

From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, Aristotle's writings lay at the foundation of Western culture, providing a body of knowledge and a set of analytical tools applicable to all areas of human investigation. Scholars of the Renaissance have emphasized the remarkable longevity and versatility of Aristotelianism, but they have mainly focused on the Latin tradition. Scarce, if any, attention has gone to vernacular works. Nonetheless, several important Renaissance figures wished to make Aristotle's works accessible and available outside the narrow circle of professional philosophers and...