Written in the mid-fifteenth century, Pope Pius II s Commentaries are the only known autobiography of a reigning pontiff and a fundamental text in the history of Renaissance humanism.

In this book, Emily O Brien positions Pius expansive autobiographical text within that century s contentious debate over ecclesiastical sovereignty. Presenting the Commentaries as Pius response to the crisis of authority, legitimacy, and relevance that was engulfing the Renaissance papacy, she shows how the Commentaries function as both an aggressive assault on the papal...

Poet, novelist, dramatist, polemicist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini continues to be one of the most influential intellectuals of post-war Italy. In Pasolini: The Sacred Flesh, Stefania Benini examines his corporeal vision of the sacred, focusing on his immanent interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and the -sacred flesh- of Christ in both Passion and Death as the subproletarian flesh of the outcast at the margins of capitalism.

By investigating the many crucifixions within Pasolini's poems, novels, films, cinematic scripts and treatments, as well...

With The Ethical Dimension of the "Decameron" Marilyn Migiel, author of A Rhetoric of the "Decameron" (winner of the MLA's 2004 Marraro Prize), returns to Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece, this time to focus on the dialogue about ethical choices that the Decameron creates with us and that we, as individuals and as groups, create with the Decameron.

Maintaining that we can examine this dialogue to gain insights into our values, our biases and our decision-making processes, Migiel offers a view of the Decameron as sticky and thorny....

Benedetto Croce was a historian, humanist, political figure, and the foremost Italian philosopher of the early twentieth-century.

A Croce Reader brings together the author's most important works across the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, history, literary criticism, and the Baroque and presents the -other- Croce that has been erased by scholarly tradition, including by Croce himself. Massimo Verdicchio traces the progress of Croce as a thinker, focusing on his philosophy of absolute historicism and its aesthetic implications. Unlike other anthologies, A Croce...

An uncompleted manuscript that combines lyric poetry and prose commentary, the Banquet (or Convivio) is one of Dante Alighieri's most important and least understood philosophical texts. As Maria Luisa Ardizzone shows, its language and logic are deeply connected to medieval culture and the philosophical debates of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

In Reading as the Angels Read, Ardizzone reconstructs the cultural and socio-political background that provided the motivation for the Banquet and offers a bold new reading of this ambitious...

Pope Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740-58) was one of the driving forces behind the Italian Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. His campaign to reconcile faith and empirical science, re-launch a dialogue between the Church and the European intellectual community, and expand papal patronage of the arts and sciences helped restore Italy's position as a center of intellectual and artistic innovation.

Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment offers a broad and nuanced assessment of Benedict's engagement with Enlightenment art, science, spirituality, and culture. The collection's...

Intricate, expressive, given to grandeur and even excess, Baroque art as a style is inseparable from the meanings it seeks to convey. Vernon Hyde Minor's Baroque Visual Rhetoric probes this combination of style and message and - equally importantly - the methodological basis on which the critical art historian comes to establish that meaning.

Drawing on a breathtaking range of critical literature, from the German founders of art history as an academic discipline to Heidegger, Derrida, and de Man, Minor considers the issue through a series of Baroque masterpieces: Bernini's...

Selena Daly s work is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the home front.

Beginning with the outbreak of war in 1914, Italian Futurism and the First World War provides vivid accounts of Futurist experiences through an analysis of previously unpublished material, including letters, diaries, and military documents as well as newspapers, magazines, and popular novels. Her focus on Futurist...

Ignazio Silone, the anti-fascist, Italian author and political activist, continues to intrigue readers and stimulate their minds nearly four decades after his death. On Friendship and Freedom contains the first published collection of correspondence between Silone and his longtime friend the philanthropist and art collector Marcel Fleischmann.

Maria Nicolai Paynter, a recognized authority on Silone and his work, deftly guides the reader through the years dominated by Fascism and Nazism as well as the decades leading up to Silone's death in 1978. Of particular interest for...

Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, a collection of lyric poems on sacred and profane love and other subjects, has traditionally been viewed as reflecting the conflicted nature of its author. However, award winning author Thomas E. Peterson argues that Petrarch's Fragmenta is an ordered and coherent work unified by narrative and theological structures.

By concentrating on the poem's reliance on Christian tenets and distinguishing between author, narrator and character, Peterson exposes the underlying narrative and theological unity of the work. Building on recent...