Francesco De Sanctis Research Articles

Care, Cure and Training of the Body According to Italian Medicine of the Nineteenth Century

Sometime in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the idea that progress in science and technology would lead to solutions for, or at least control over, human ills had reached Italy as a result of positivism. The Parliament of the new Kingdom of Italy, formed in 1861, worked, among other things, towards increasing the processes of modernisation and industrialisation that were already ongoing in northern and central Italy. This was done to combat the backwardness of the poorer regions in the south and towards augmenting the size and quality of the newly created Italian army so that it could compete on an equal footing with the powerful nations of Europe. In the same period, the government was legislating in favour of public education to fight the great problem of illiteracy, upgrade the teaching classes, improve existing schools and procure the funds needed for social hygiene and care of the body as factors in the physical and moral regeneration of the race. A campaign to increase physical education for both sexes in schools was successfully begun by the then Education Minister, Francesco De Sanctis, who made this subject obligatory by law throughout the nation in 1878. Much has already been said of the Italian doctors of the time who were strongly in favour of gymnastics, traditional games and/or modern sports, as well as other hygienic and recreational physical activities for people of all ages; suffice to mention the ‘apostle of Italian sport', Dr. Angelo Mosso (1846–1910), and the ‘father of Italian gymnastics', Dr. Emilio Baumann (1843–1917). However, not enough has been said about the support for these same activities offered by another famous doctor from the same period, Paolo Mantegazza (1830–1910), on whom the first part of the essay will focus. The latter part will propose a comparative consideration of the works of Mantegazza, Baumann and Mosso, showing similarities but also notable differences in their personality and philosophical approach.

Resurrecting Dante's Florence: Figural Realism in the Decameron and the Esposizioni

Resurrecting Dante's Florence:Figural Realism in the Decameron and the Esposizioni Kristina Marie Olson Much of Boccaccio's work is heavilyinfluenced by Dante, and near the end ofhis life he both wrote a treatise celebratingDante and delivered a set of lecturescommenting in detail on the first twenty-eight[sic] cantos of the Inferno. Yet theDecameron is an implicitly anti-Dantean work. —Norton Anthology of World Literature So reads the introductory matter to selections from the Decameron in the Norton Anthology to World Literature,2 which, after offering preliminary evidence of the relation between these two works (the Decameron's division into one-hundred tales; the pedigree of "prencipe Galeotto" from Inferno V), summarily dismisses any sustained similarities between the two works in favor of a rhetorical opposition. As incorrect as this classification may seem, the critical tradition of Italian studies forged this rhetoric before any misgivings within the marketplace of World Literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, Francesco de Sanctis called the Decameron the "nuova Commedia, non la 'divina,' ma la 'terrestre' Commedia."3 Much later, Erich Auerbach made claims about [End Page 45] Boccaccio's realism and the historical content of the Decameron4 that were eventually challenged by the work of Vittore Branca:5 Il capolavoro del Boccaccio, invece, proprio perché appare nei suoi aspetti più costituzionali e più validi come la tipica "commedia dell'uomo" rappresenta attraverso i paradigmi canonici alla visione cristiana e scolastica della vita e insieme come una vasta e multiforme epopea della società medievale italiana colta e ritratta nel suo autunno splendido e lussureggiante, non si oppone alla Divina Commedia ma in qualche modo le si affianca e quasi la completa. (Branca 29) But despite Branca's efforts, a relative lack of formal and historical comparative analysis of these two capolavori continues to exist. Though Carlo Delcorno established that Boccaccio was familiar with Dante's works by 1350, and echoes of Dante's verse have been discerned in the Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, the Caccia di Diana, the Amorosa visione and the Corbaccio,6 studies of Dante's presence in the Decameron have truly emerged in the late twentieth century with the work of Bettinzoli, Hollander, and Kirkham.7 Yet the presence of nearly verbatim passages in the Decameron and the Esposizioni requires us, I believe, to reconsider the nature of the influence of the Commedia on the [End Page 46] Decameron and the chronological terms of Boccaccio's engagement with Dante's work. Appearing in Decameron I.8, VI.9, and IX.8 and in the text of the later Esposizioni, these "autocitations" not only imply that Boccaccio kept the Commedia in mind while writing the Decameron, but that he himself intended that certain of the hundred novelle be read as a "gloss" of Dante's poem.8 Interestingly enough, it is one of Boccaccio's works that explicitly bears witness to his deep knowledge of the Commedia as a source for textual analogues to the Decameron. The collection of Boccaccio's incomplete public lectures on Inferno I to XVII, commonly called the Comento but referred to by Giorgio Padoan as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (October 1373–January 1374), often enters into the margins of work on Boccaccio as dantista but have seldom solicited the exclusive treatments such as those mentioned.9 The Esposizioni, the first lectura Dantis offered to the people of Florence in the church of Santo Stefano in Badia, most conspicuously demonstrates Boccaccio's close reading of Dante's text, though it is an unfinished work (and most likely not the exact content of the public lectures). To consider these autocitations in the Decameron and the Esposizioni within their Dantean cornice and their interpretation of the changes in Florentine society depicted in the Commedia, a view of Boccaccio as storyteller, chronicler and social commentator emerges, one that should lead to further reconsiderations of his classification in respect to his formidable processor. While the almost verbatim nature of these passages is often noted by Giorgio Padoan in his edition of the Esposizioni, and certain critics have also noted parallels between these texts, no one has ventured to interpret their...

Constructing a national identity from a created literary past: Giosuè Carducci and the development of a national literature

Giosuè Carducci's conception of Italian literature differed from those of Francesco de Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. He argued that Italian literature, together with a concomitant cultural identity and political mission, developed along a continuous, progressive and evolutionary path. This study analyzes Carducci's creation of an Italian cultural and political identity through literary history and his construction of a plausible model for its historical development by incorporating literary,scientific and political theories. Carducci gave Italians a past of which they could be proud, proof of Italy's leading role in Europe's civilizing mission, and a strategy to accomplish it. Carducci's conception of italianitÀ, defined in terms of a historic mission of grandezza , was one of several brands of Italian nationalism. His linking of literary history to aspirations of national unity and aggrandizement implied that the mantle of the Risorgimento now belonged to the educated elite. This linkage of literature and national identity to aspirations of cultural and political hegemony explains why Carducci was so popular with the Nationalist Party whose leaders invoked his literary history to legitimize their political program and to discredit their political opponents prior to World War I and under Fascism.

A Year's Work in the Seventies

The year's work may be considered as a motto of our Association. I doubt whether it would be approved as a motto to be inscribed on a coat-of-arms, if we ever cared to have one. Since our claim is to be both modern and humane, I think we can rely on our motto being sanctioned by the thirty-two volumes of the rear's Work in Modern Language Studies, as well as by the forty-four volumes of the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature and by our latest venture, the rearbook of English Studies. I would not call the presidency of the Association a year's work, though it certainly is a yearly distinction. I must confess that when such a distinction unexpectedly befell me and I consequently found myself blown into mid-air by the presidential wind, like a barren leaf, wondering where I would land, the motto of the Association came to my mind at once. It reminded me of my humble, though possibly rightful origins, namely of my very small contribution to the rear's Work in Modern Language Studies some twenty years ago, and it seemed to inspire me with a much needed sense of purpose and hope in my search of a worthy subject for a presidential address. Why not a year's work in the early seventies? Of course not in the nineteen-seventies. It is not for the president to foresee, much less to influence the work of the Association. Apart from constitutional niceties, it is the privilege as well as the curse of age that one should become blind to the present. Like the damned souls in Dante's Hell, old people are normally long-sighted. Thanks to God, we are not long-sighted in respect of the future, as the damned souls seem to be. We are, up to a point, in respect of the past, which increasingly dominates us, whether we like it or not. Personally, as a veteran student of the Italian Renaissance, I should have chosen the early seventies of either the fourteenth century, say the last years of both Petrarch and Boccaccio, or the fifteenth century, say the first steps of Lorenzo de' Medici as a ruler of Florence, or even better the sixteenth century, say 157I-2, the year of the battle of Lepanto, where a great Spaniard, Cervantes, fought, and of the night of Saint Bartholomew, where a prominent French scholar, Ramus, was killed. The trouble was that such places were familiar to me because I had been working there in a different capacity throughout my life: they were my worm-holes. In fact there could be no doubt as to where I should land as a falling leaf: it ought to be in the early eighteen-seventies. As president of a scholarly association I may be expected to give an account of what I stand for. That simply means where I come from. My Italian predecessors, Benedetto Croce, President of the Association in 1923-4, and Professor Migliorini, President in 1956, both of whom I revere as masters, will exempt me from answering a personal question. As a student of literature, Croce succeeded Francesco De Sanctis, the greatest nineteenth-century Italian critic. Similarly, as a student of language, Professor Migliorini would certainly acknowledge Graziadio Ascoli, the founder of Italian Philology, as his master. De Sanctis's fundamental history of

Respice Finem: The Literary Criticism of Giovanni Gentile

If the primary purpose of literary criticism is to convey a sense of the unique individuality of a poet and his poems, as most Italian critics since Francesco De Sanctis have believed, then Giovanni Gentile is a much finer critic than has yet been recognized. Although Gentile's main interests, from the turn of the century until his death in 1944, were in philosophy and educational reform, he also wrote a series of critical essays in which he struggles, with increasing insight, to understand the nature of poetic individuality and to articulate his sense of the individuality of the poetry of Dante and Leopardi. Although Petrarch, Alfieri, and Manzoni also came under his scrutiny, only Dante and Leopardi sustained his interest and elicited efforts of understanding. Only his essays on them are complex enough to serve as counterparts to the advances in his philosophy. If his response to poetry seriously affected the nature of his philosophy, as I think it did, it is mainly the poetry of )ante and Leopardi that had this effect. The significance of Gentile's criticism must be maintained in the face of almost universal opposition by Italian philosophers and critics. Croce felt that Gentile was utterly anaesthetic in his reading of any and all poems and that his actualistic philosophy, as logocentric, was fundamentally at odds with poetry. Guido Calogero has said that the aesthetics of a man as insensitive to art as Gentile could not be taken

Symonds and De Sanctis: a Study in the Historiography of the Renaissance

Je. Spingarn was the first to observe the considerable influence exercised by Francesco De Sanctis (1818-1883), the Italian critic and literary historian, upon the work of John Addington Symonds. Reviewing in 1908 the new edition of De Sanctis’ study of Petrarch published by Benedetto Croce in 1907, Spingarn said:The name of Francesco de Sanctis is virtually unknown to English readers. A few casual phrases in Symonds's ‘Renaissance in Italy,’ and a friendly but wholly inadequate notice in Saintsbury's ‘History of Criticism,’ are almost the sole references to his work in our language. But with his ideas English-speaking people are more familiar than they suspect; for from his pages much that is illuminating in Symonds's treatment of Italian literature (including many of the most personal ‘impressions’) seems to have been directly transferred.