Benedetto Varchi, the Accademia degli Infiammati, and the Origins of the Italian Academic Movement*

Abstract

The sixteenth-century Italian academies, in the judgment of modern scholars, played a role in the intellectual life of their time and had an impact on the culture of their age to an extent not yet fully assessed. In their own day they not only carried on and developed more fully many aspects of Quattrocento scholarship, but offered scholars a forum in which to distil and crystallize novel research which otherwise would have lacked an appropriate outlet. They spread the fruits of both tradition and innovation to a large audience, and they did so by adopting the volgare as their official language. They thereby gave living proof to the theories laid down by Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) and Sperone Speroni (1500-1588) that the vernacular was just as effective a medium of poetic and scholarly discourse as the classical Latin which had been the language of choice of the earlier humanists, and which continued to be the language of the universities.