PROMOTING POGGIO IN THE AGE OF REFORM: CORRESPONDENCE OF TOMMASO TONELLI AND WILLIAM SHEPHERD

Abstract

The works of the Rev. William Shepherd of Liverpool (1768–1847) are not much read nowadays; nor, alas, are those of Cavaliere Tommaso Tonelli, a Florentine contemporary of Shepherd's. But between them these two established the European view of the humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) which endured a century and more, and which placed Poggio full square at the centre of the Revival of Letters. The story of his famous rediscovery of classical authors — speeches of Cicero, Quintilian entire, Lucretius, among others — and of his career as papal secretary and Chancellor of Florence was first treated synthetically in Shepherd's biography, The Life of Poggio Bracciolini. The book went through two editions (Liverpool 1802 and 1837), with an intermediate Italian translation, greatly augmented, from the hand of Tonelli (Florence 1825). Besides the Vita di Poggio, Tonelli was also responsible for the publication of Poggio's Latin letters, in an edition which was not rivalled until the last decade and is even now not wholly supplanted. Hallam's influential literary history opened an account of the Renaissance with some pages on Poggio, and that was a direct result of studying the labours of Shepherd and Tonelli, the former having ensured that copies of these works were placed in the critic's hands.