Giovanni Pontano Research Articles

Giovanni Pontano hears the street soundscape of Naples

AbstractGiovanni Pontano’s dialogue Antonius can be read almost as a thick description of the soundscape of a Neapolitan street in the mid‐ to late‐15th century, complete with public announcements, street performers, domestic arguments, workers’ banter, charms and spells, processions, errand boys, bells, clocks, cockerels, and much more. Antonius was first printed in 1491, and then in a 1501 Opera edition alongside another dialogue, Charon, Pontano’s treatises De fortitudine, De principe and De obedientia, and his treatises on the “social virtues,” De liberalitate, De benificentia, De magnificentia, De splendore, and De conviventia. Using the street soundscape of Antonius as a framework, this essay interleaves both sonic reportage and reflections on the ethics and purpose of sound drawn from the other works included in the 1501 edition, to construct a rich and surprisingly detailed impression of the urban soundscape as it struck Pontano, or at least as he represented it in a literary context.

Cykl poetycki do Hyelli ze zbioru Lusus Andrea Navagera – wstęp, przekład, komentarz

A poetic cycle on Hyella from Andrea Navagero’s Lusus: introduction, translation, commentary : The paper presents the first Polish translation of a mini-series of six short poems about Hyella by Andrea Navagero (1483–1529). The selected works are part of Navagero’s famous Latin poetry collection entitled Lusus. The translation is supplemented by an introduction and commentary notes. The Latin text reproduced in the paper is based on the edition of Lusus by Claudio Griggio (2001). The introduction presents the author’s biography and includes a brief description of the whole collection. Navagero was a diplomat, a poet and the official historian of the Republic of Venice. Collected by friends in Orationes duae carminaque nonnulla, his poems were edited posthumously in Venice in 1530. The most important part of Lusus are bucolic epigrams, a new form of Neo-Latin pastoral developed by Navagero. This minor lyric form called “pastoral play” (lusus pastoralis) gained recognition quickly and was widely imitated in 16th century. The collection also includes other literary genres – bucolic poems, elegies, and erotic poems. However, the most famous is the series of epigrams whose heroine or addressee is Hyella, a girl impossible to identify. The introduction presents a discussion about the sources and the interpretation of the love poems about Hyella (poems 21, 22, 28, 31, 32 and 37). The most important literary tradition from which Navagero draws inspiration is the Greek and Latin ancient epigram. For poem 21, the source is the Anacreontea 19, while poem 22 uses the motifs of the lamp and the night as the guardians of lovers, both popular in The Greek Anthology. For two other pieces, the direct source is the poetry of Catullus: poem 31 uses Catullus’s carmen 5, while poem 32 combines motifs from Catullus’s carmina 82, 92 and 109. In addition, in poem 28 we find similarities with Ausonius’s epigram 9. Other important sources for Navagero were the poetry of Petrarch and the neo-Catullan poets, mostly Giovanni Pontano, Michele Marullo, and Cristoforo Landino.

Wkład Alfonsa V Wspaniałomyślnego w upowszechnienie katalońskich zwyczajów kulinarnych w Królestwie Neapolu w XV wieku

Contribution of Alfonso V the Magnanimous to the Popularization of Catalan Culinary Customs in the Kingdom of Napl es in the 15th century 
 The wars for Naples ended in 1442 with the victory of Alfonso V the Magnanimous, the ruler of the Crown of Aragon (1416–1458). The emergence of foreign authority in southern Italy entailed the transfer of the Catalan culture, language and customs to the area of Italian Mezzogiorno. In this process, Catalan culinary traditions which developed at the end of the fourteenth century also occupied an important place. One of them was a separate sweet snack, referred to by the Catalan term col·lació (collatio in Latin). The organization and celebration of col·lació became an important form of ostentation for the Catalan ruling and financial elites. In this article, the author discusses excerpts from historical sources whose authors include, among others, Antonio Beccadelli, Jordi de Centelles, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Giovanni Pontano, as well as the ambassadors of Barcelona and Portugal and other anonymous authors writing about the times of Alfonso V the Magnanimous. The data provided by these sources clearly indicate that this ruler followed the custom of eating sweet colazione known in Italy at this time and gave it a new meaning at least as early as in the 1440s. Thanks to this ruler of Aragon and new Neapolitan king, the sweet snack became one of the instruments of the ostentation of wealth and prestige for the new rulers of the southern part of Italy and soon after also for other princes and lords of the area.

Performing Power in Early Renaissance Italy: Princely Image and Consensus in Political Treatises

This article investigates how the idea of performing power becomes crucial in Italian Renaissance political thought. The analysis focuses on two pre-Machiavellian mirrors for princes written in the second half of the fifteenth century in the kingdom of Naples, under the Aragonese monarchy: Giovanni Pontano’s De principe (1465) and Giuniano Maio’s De maiestate (1492), respectively in Neo-Latin and the vernacular. These are the first Italian political treatises where the concept of majesty is systematically theorized and is linked with the practical aspects of the art of governing and the performance of power. In particular, the whole second part of Pontano’s text defines and illustrates the virtue of majesty as coinciding with the “external” image of princely rulership and with all concrete strategies deployed by the prince to gain consensus. This concept is recovered and emphasized in Maio’s De maiestate, the first treatise entirely devoted to this key aspect of kingship, to the extent that the figure of ideal princeps is encapsulated in the all-encompassing notion of majesty, the virtue that becomes the most important royal attribute. Thus, this new theory of statecraft, with a specific focus on the image that the ruler is able to give to his subjects and on the importance of the people’s consent, displays the emergence of a blossoming idea of political realism, which is specific to this age and context and would develop in more mature forms in the following century.

Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton by Patricia Philippy

MLR, .,   quite fit with the productively elasticized definitions of knowledge found elsewhere in this collection. en again, any attempt to hypostasize a universally applicable sense of ‘knowing’ would be fundamentally to miss the point of this volume—that religious knowledge was diverse and contested. In his essay on practical manifestations of belief, Ethan Shagan draws our attention to the necessity of recovering older models of believing that complicate ‘our inherited category of “belief”’ (p. ). e collection does this with great success: it stands as an important contribution to an emerging body of literary scholarship that is investigating the history of belief with renewed attention. As Rowan Williams’s wide-ranging Aerword intimates, it may also help us to recover some of the foundations of our present-day habits of thought. G  C C, C J A Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton. By P P. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. A fly caught in amber is a conventional image of eternity. In the early modern period it could be much more than that, as Patricia Philippy shows, discussing just such an object presented to King Alfonso of Naples by the merchant and antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona. It provides her with ‘a parable, a figuration, and a myth that, collectively, define the central concerns of this study’ (p. ), namely the manifold textual, material, and cultural entanglements of post-Reformation memory culture. By not only tracing the fate of this particular amber inclusion, which survives only by virtue of being recollected in a text by the late fieenth-century Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano, but also reconstructing the interconnecting discursive frameworks of antiquarianism, theology, post-Reformation polemic, myth, and gender through which the early modern period made sense of amber more generally (pp. –), Philippy powerfully demonstrates the methodology of her study in nuce. Her ‘interdisciplinary’ (p. ) approach to post-Reformation memory culture is informed by historical phenomenology and new materialism or ‘corporeal feminism’, with Merleau-Ponty and Braidotti as frequent reference points, which lead her to explore ‘the embedded and embodied sets of interrelations’ between subject and object, life and death (p. ). More specifically, the study pursues the notion of a ‘material religion’, aiming ‘to account for changing relationships between worshippers and sacred objects, ceremonies and sites, demonstrating the various ways in which post-Reformation monuments and memorial artefacts were created in the lingering shadow of discarded monuments and icons’ (p. ). In order to do so, Philippy draws on an impressive range of manuscript and printed texts, on objects such as needlework, jewels, rosaries, personal bequests, and antique rarities, on commemorative practices , as well as on personal, national, and confessional narratives (p. ), which gives the lie to the somewhat misleading title promising a trajectory ‘from Shakespeare  Reviews to Milton’ only (the latter features merely in a final subchapter). Like the amber inclusion it chooses as its emblem, this study holds much more in store. Part  proceeds from familiar ground, the influence of a Protestant reconceptualization of the sacraments in sacred and secular works, but it deploys the notion of a ‘sacramental poetics’ (p. ) to draw together an unusual array of historical figures, monuments, and texts. e first two chapters are dedicated to the Montagu family’s practices of commemoration and mourning in the s and s, specifically a ‘memorial program’ erected in a parish church by Sidney Montagu in memory of his three-year-old son, which uneasily negotiated traditional and reformed rites of mourning, and the family’s ‘monumental circle’, at the centre of which Anne Montagu and her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Harington Montagu, created ‘memorial texts and objects that are permeated by and promote the family’s Puritan faith’ (p. ). Gender difference encodes religious difference, and vice versa, when the Montagu brothers’ vision of dynastic affiliation fuses with the Pauline idea of the church body, their conforming Calvinism seeking to contain the more radical Puritanism which the family’s women embraced as a ‘productive field of creativity’ that encourages women’s intellectual, political and literary engagements (p. ). is notion carries over into the next chapter’s reading of Cymbeline: Jachimo’s commemorative description at . . transforms Innogen’s chamber into...

Giovanni Pontano, Ad uxorem (De amore coniugali III 2)

The present essay sets out a detailed analysis of Giovanni Pontano’s Ad uxorem, an elegy included in the collection entitled De amore coniugali. Alongside linguistic, metrical, stylistic, allegorical and structural observations, it hones in on the representation of Pontano’s wife and children, on mythology and on symposiac and divinatory features. It furthermore examines from a comparative perspective the major influences: Horace’s Carmina, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid’s Heroides and exile poetry, as well as Statius’ Silvae. In addition, it pays attention to analogous passages elsewhere in Pontano, both within the same conjugal canzoniere and in the lyric collections Parthenopeus, De tumulis, Hendecasyllabi and Eridanus. Ad uxorem stems from the need for self-consolation, from Pontano’s desire to give vent to his nostalgia for his family during the Christmas festivities; the poetic medium proves to be an effective antidote to emotions of grief.

Da Valla a Facio, dalla prassi alla teorizzazione retorica della scrittura storica

At the end of the fifteenth century, in the Aragonese court of Naples, the reflections about the writing of history produced precise rhetorical laws, summarized in the Actius by Giovanni Pontano, but those reflections started up in 1447, with an inflamed controversy among two of the most important humanists of that time: Lorenzo Valla and Bartolomeo Facio. That controversy presented many innovative elements in the invention of political strategies and in the definition of rhetorical rules: the description of contemporaneity and the reorganization of memory found legitimacy through a new professional attention to the analysis of sources and to the use of rhetorical form. About these problems, latin antiquity did not offer specific theoretical models, which were instead adapted from the judicial oratory. In short, the connection between the description of the contemporary, the rhetorical reflection, the need to celebrate and legitimate the royal majesty found a very fertile field in the court of Naples. The discipline of historical writing found there a privileged space: there the historians were well paid, there they were professionally recognized and, subsequently, there they invented a precise regulation of arguments, forms and methods in the historical writing.

Some Remarks on Renaissance Mythophilia. The Medical Poetics of Wonder: Girolamo Fracastoro and His Thought World (Appendix Galeotto Marzio, De doctrina promiscua [ante 1490, princeps 1548

The following pages make a case for the important role played by Aristotle’s Metaphysics α 2 982b11–21 in Renaissance poetics and especially in that of Girolamo Fracastoro. As this passage, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in general, have traditionally been denied a major role in the poetics of the Renaissance, I have been obliged to develop my argument in three sections. [1.] The first focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s roundbreaking reading of the quotation in psychological and epistemological terms, and on how he and his contemporaries were able to harmonize it both with the corpus Aristotelicum and with the development of a place for poetry in the system of the arts. [2.] The second section illustrates how the first humanists used Aristotle’s authority to invert the meaning of the passage, transforming it into an argument in defense of the primacy of poetry over the rest of the arts. This appropriation had two undesiderable effects: either depriving the passage of its theoretical implications or, worse, assimilating Aristotle’s words into a Platonizing vision of poetry. Only with the recovery of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in the late fifteenth century did the passage escape its new status as a commonplace in humanist defense of poetry, and was briefly again considered as a point of departure for the analysis of concepts such as fabula (fiction) and admiratio (wonder), based on philosophical, poetic, and medical premises. [3] The last section introduces Galeotto Marzio’s and Giovanni Pontano’s pioneering works on these two concepts—fabula and admiratio—, as an introduction to the subsequent synthesis done by Girolamo Fracastoro, who, from the positions held by Marzio and Pontano as well as Aquinas’s original intuition, was able to harmonize natural philosophy and poetry by means of their psychological implications. This is what I have called here the ‘medical poetics of wonder’ or, more simply, mythotherapy.

The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain by Keith David Howard

Reviewed by: The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain by Keith David Howard Susan Byrne Howard, Keith David. The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain. Wood-bridge: Tamesis, 2014. 171 pp. ISBN: 978-18-5566-282-7. Howard begins his monograph with captivating quotations from Machiavelismo degollado por la Christiana Sabiduría de España y Austria, a work by Claudio Clemente published in 1637. Clemente's polemical tone nicely sets the stage for the discussion that follows and for Howard's expressed goal: to demonstrate "the observable appropriation of key Machiavellian concepts" (5) by Spanish political writers who simultaneously masked those conceptual adoptions with anti-Machiavellian rhetoric. Multiple early modern political writings are incorporated to lay a clear foundation for, and solid support to, Howard's contentions. In chapter 1, "Medieval and Renaissance Humanist Political Discourse and Machiavelli," Howard skillfully synthesizes the historical development of political, theological and societal concepts on kingship and rulers while demonstrating the impact of that thought on Spanish writers with relevant textual citations. A section on virtue and fortune includes examples from Boethius, Petrarch and Cicero, to Coluccio Salutati and Giovanni Pontano, all as background to Diego de Valera's discussion of prudence in his Doctrinal de príncipes (1475). As Howard sums up: "Valera develops the idea that human providence and prudence exist not in the realm of certainty but in the limited human perspective of probability" (32), i.e., Valera, like his (semi) contemporary Machiavelli, speaks of political contingency. Here and throughout, Howard shows a keen eye for lexical detail and conceptual expression; his close readings are sharp and focused. In chapter 2, "Machiavelli and Spanish Imperialist Discourse in the Sixteenth Century," Howard studies how the demands of unification and expansion led to "a more practical understanding of political power" (42), hence a greater role for [End Page 168] Machiavelli's writings. With a review of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese writings, the political landscape is described cogently, telling textual examples are offered. In counsel given by Furió Ceriol to Phillip II, Howard finds the same overarching remedies proposed by Machiavelli, while the writings of Balthazar de Ayala show multiple parallels to Machiavelli's Discourses through use of identical figures and events to exemplify, even as corrections are made to mistaken historical referents. Howard's close study reveals the unattributed yet obvious incorporation of Machi-avellian thought into Spanish political treatises prior to his inclusion on the Roman Index in 1559. Chapter 3, "Machiavelli and the Foundations of the Spanish Reason-of-State Tradition: Giovanni Botero and Pedro de Ribadeneyra," begins with examples of changing French attitudes towards Machiavelli following the Index listing. A strong case is made for adaptation with parallel criticism of the Italian diplomat through Botero, who develops Machiavelli's ideas while suggesting that the Catholic religion serves as a more secure platform for a king than other religious creeds. Catholicism is an "instrument to keep his subjects obedient and thus to conserve his state" (78). Turning to Ribadeneyra, Howard shows that the Spanish Jesuit was "very familiar" (90) with both the Prince and the Discourses, and he illustrates quite convincingly with Ribadeneyra's unequivocal dictum that a ruler must never lie quickly undermined by his contention that dissimulation, secretive withholding of information, and doubleentendres that one knows or suspects will be misunderstood are not lies but, rather, acts of prudence. This chapter highlights the creation and exploitation of a dichotomy between "good" and "bad" reason of state, a "double-sided technique" (95) that would persist in subsequent Spanish political writings. In chapter 4, "Machiavellian Discourse in the Hispanic Baroque Reason-of-State Tradition," Howard addresses later developments in attitudes towards the Italian diplomat, showing how even Spanish writers who do not directly address political matters will continue to spread Machiavelli's concepts. Here again, Howard finds many lexical subtleties that reveal conceptual content, as he highlights the continued reliance on Machiavellian doctrinal stances accompanied by simultaneous denial of the same thought. In numerous examples adduced, the Spaniards are shown to use lexical gymnastics as a way exploit loopholes while providing cover through a stance of moral flexibility. Barbosa Homem, for example, asserts "astute" as a positive trait...

Cortese's Ideal Cardinal? Praising Art, Spendour and Magnificence in Bernardino de Carvajal's Roman Residence

This article offers a close analysis of three neo-Latin poems from a larger cycle of verse dedicated in 1511 to the Spanish cardinal Bernardino de Carvajal (1456-1523) by the Italian humanist Giambattista Cantalicio (1445-1515). Reviewing the poet's flattering descriptions of lavish banquets, the daily routine of the cardinal's court and a tapestry cycle which once adorned Carvajal's residence, it further analyses the contemporary aesthetics which underlie Cantalicio's praise of the cardinal's lost palace in Rome. In the process, the article also reviews the social dynamic which prompted the display of magnificence as well as the problematic issues raised by the flagrant display of such splendour within an ecclesiastical context. Exploring social practice, artworks and intellectual treatises, the article outlines the process by which the concept of magnificence, which forms the basis of Cantalicio's praise of the cardinal, was rehabilitated in the decades preceding the Reformation. Placing the poet's encomium not only in the light of Giovanni Pontano's so-called social treatises and Paolo Cortese's De cardinalatu (1510), but also within the context of the contemporary iconographic programme at Carvajal's titular church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, the article embeds these neo-Latin poems within the wider social, historical and cultural context of Renaissance Rome.

Virgil and the Water of Nola in the Renaissance

Abstract The article focuses on the Renaissance debate about an anecdote reported by Gellius, Noctes Atticae 6.20, according to which Virgil erased the name of the city of Nola, in Campania, from Georgics 2.225, since the Nolans did not allow him to run some public water into a farm belonging to him. This essay offers an outline of how and where, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the debate pro or contra Gellius developed. The epicentre of this debate was the Kingdom of Naples, since Gellius’ anecdote cast a shadow over Nola, which in the Renaissance period was a prosperous centre and wished to appear as the authentic descendant of the glorious ancient town that, according to Livy and Silius, was loyal to Rome during the Punic Wars. The citizens of Nola were concerned that Gellius’ words could be used to create an image of the city as one hostile to the most celebrated poet in antiquity, and thus damage its public reputation. Some voices emerged in defence of Nola while others argued against it. Whether as defenders or accusers, a number of the leading humanists of the Kingdom became involved in this querelle, namely Giovanni Pontano, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Ambrogio Leone, through whom the debate also reached the Netherlands, and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

The myth of the Hesperides’ golden apples in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Giovanni Pontano’s De hortis Hesperidum sive de cultu citriorum

The myth of the Hesperides’ golden apples in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Giovanni Pontano’s De hortis Hesperidum sive de cultu citriorum The eleventh Hercules’ labour was the conquest of the Hesperides’ golden apples. Those precious fruits, Gea’s wedding gift for Zeus and Hera, were planted in a beautiful garden situated in the world’s end. The guardians of this place were three nymphs called Hesperides and a snake. Two remarkable humanists of the Italian Quattrocento, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Giovanni Pontano, inspired by the ancient myth, recall in their poems an image of a garden in which grows a tree with mysterious golden apples. They give two different interpretations of this mythological motif. Falerina’s garden in the Cantos IV and V of the volume II of Orlando Innamorato is a very dangerous place. The tree that grows in the middle of this false Eden kills everyone who approaches it with a rain of enormous and heavy golden fruits. Giovanni Pontano indentifies the Hesperides’ golden apples with citrus fruits cultivated in the southern Italy and invents a legend about the origine of those plants. He imagines that Venus transformed the body of her beloved Adonis into a beautiful citrus tree.

The Fruit of Love in Giambattista Basile's “The Three Citrons”

The magical fruit featured in Giambattista Basile’s baroque fairy tale “The Three Citrons” transforms into the protagonist’s longed-for white-and-red wife. Basile’s unusual choice of citron as the object of this love metamorphosis belongs to the tradition of citrus representation in early modern Italy, in particular, Giovanni Pontano’s long Latin poem De Hortis Hesperidum (1501). This text identifies citrus with the mythical golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides and with Venus’s own fruit. Through the exaltation of citrus, Pontano and Basile glorify the region where they made their home; furthermore, the parallels between the metamorphosis in “The Three Citrons” and the one in Pontano’s Latin poem give luster to the language and the theme of Basile’s Neapolitan-dialect fairy tale.

Obraz miłości małżeńskiej w eklodze Acon Giovanniego Pontana

Acon is one of the six eclogues written by Giovanni Pontano, one of the most remarkable humanists of the Italian Quattrocento. In this work, the author presents an image of conjugal love by the usage of a bucolic context, a model of shepherd love and some myths from Ovid’s Meta- morphoses. He also refers to some facts from his own biography (marriage with Adriana Sassone). The pastoral figures who speak in the eclogue Acon are Petasillus and Saliuncus. They reminisce their master Meliseus (Pontano’s alter ego) who used to sing beautiful songs for his beloved wife Ariadna. The topics of those songs were the period of engagement, the first days of marriage and the pain caused by the separation of the spouses.

La lettera di dedica a Federico da Montefeltro del primo libro delle Commentationes in centum sententiis Ptolemaei di Giovanni Gioviano Pontano

The Commentationes in centum sententiis Ptolemaei by Giovanni Pontano are the most important translation and commentary on Ps.-Ptolemy’s Καρπός (Centiloquium) written in the second half of 15th century. This essay analyzes the reception of Pontano’s astrological work among contemporary scholars such as Pico, Poliziano and Ermolao Barbaro. An appendix to the essay contains Pontano’s Prologus to his Commentationes in Ptolemaeum together with an translation into modern Italian.

Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

<i>Stella P. Revard</i>, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.<i>Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700</i>. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts &amp; Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

Tinctoris and the Neapolitan Eruditi

The explosion of Johannes Tinctoris’s treatises over the course of about five years in the mid-1470s has been shown to be not necessarily the inspired fruit of his employment at the royal court of Naples, beginning in or around 1472-73, but rather the result of several years of singing, instructing, reading, and even drafting treatises before his arrival there. However much his years of training and experience in musical practice and theory before Naples might have shaped Tinctoris, it is nevertheless only at Naples that these treatises found themselves completed, circulated, and in some cases even printed. Drawing attention to the Neapolitan context of the completion and reception of several of Tinctoris’s treatises allows for a comparative examination of Tinctoris and some of his closest colleagues at the Aragonese court in Naples, namely Giuniano Maio, Giovanni Pontano, and Joanmarco Cinico. This study has implications for our understanding of several of his treatises, including De inventione et usu musice, Complexus effectuum musices, and Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, as well as the prefaces to his Proportionale musices, Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum, and Liber de arte contrapuncti.

Aspects du lyrisme conjugal à la Renaissance ed. by Perrine Galand, John Nassichuk

Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra. Condé proves to be the most difficult writer for François to pin down within the limits of her thesis because Condé herself eschews labels of any kind, including that of ‘feminist,’ for instance. Interestingly , François mentions an interview she conducted with Condé in which the novelist refuses François’s interpretation of ‘father’ Africa, drawing her attention to uterine and other maternal images in her fiction in relation to the continent. François persists in her argument, nonetheless, and offers a compelling, perhaps courageous, counterargument to the novelist,noting that Africa in Heremakhonon,for example,is associated with phallic images, references to the illegitimate fatherless child, and to efforts to locate one’s identity in relation to male figures. François also insists that Condé seems to contradict herself,if not fully embracing‘feminism,’at least calling attention repeatedly to gender dynamics and male-female power struggles. Ultimately, Condé’s novels show troublesome relationships with the mother, as well as thorny father figures. Writing takes on great significance in Condé’s novels, but is also problematic, for her characters suffer writer’s block or are misunderstood. Chapter 2 focuses on Schwarz-Bart’s works that imagine the Caribbean as a locus of fruitful rediscovery in the wake of the unsatisfactory return to Africa. In Ti Jean L’horizon, the main character searches for the Africa of his grandfather’s stories, but discovers that Africa does not welcome this prodigal son of sorts. François shows how Schwarz-Bart requires her characters to abandon the single-minded search for a fixed identity in the fatherland, and to accept the multiplicity of their roots and identities. François highlights the history of Creole as a literary means of expression, accepted first among male writers, but later also by female writers like Schwarz-Bart. This is another strength of François’s study in that she has a vast knowledge of topics related to her thesis and provides rich background material for the reader. She likewise establishes important connections to other novelists and scholars. In chapter 3, for instance, when she discusses the themes of sisterhood, diary writing, and madness in the novels of Warner-Vieyra, François underscores similar concerns in the writings of Assia Djebar and references Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal study, The Mad Woman in the Attic. François’s book, then, appeals to students new to Francophone studies who will require background information , as well as to seasoned scholars. Rider University (NJ) Mary L. Poteau-Tralie Galand, Perrine, et John Nassichuk, éd. Aspects du lyrisme conjugal à la Renaissance. Genève: Droz, 2011. ISBN 978-2-600-01270-6. Pp. 444. $125. The recrudescence of literature,philosophy,and theory written in Latin constitutes one of the many triumphs of the Renaissance and is crucial to understanding the humanistic revival of the period. Despite the fortunate existence of journals that either 222 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 223 focus on or deal with neo-Latin intellectual endeavors, too little attention is given to this essential part of scholarly output during the early modern era. Attempting to rectify this oversight, Galand and Nassichuk provide an excellent collection of articles dedicated to the topic of marriage as expressed in lyric poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The volume contains sixteen essays from colleagues mostly in continental Europe, but also in the United Kingdom and North America. Emphasizing neo-Latin poetry in France, the study also includes lyric offerings from Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. The Italian/Roman influence is fundamental for understanding the lines of descent which begin with poets from Antiquity such as Ovid, Catullus, Martial, and Statius, and extend to Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), the standardbearer for conjugal love poetry during Renaissance. Indeed, Nassichuk’s first article (he makes two contributions in addition to co-editing) examines Pontano’s De amore conjugali, a text that adapts, “l’élégie érotique ancienne au thème de la vie familiale” (37). Written in part as a lamentation mourning the death of Pontano’s wife Adriana Sassone, De amore conjugali becomes a model for later authors such as Jean Salmon Marcrin...

Reading Marsilio Ficino in Quattrocento Italy. The Case of Aragonese Naples

This essay focuses on the reception of Marsilio Ficino’s works and ideas in Naples at the time of the Aragonese domination, and it offers a preliminary discussion of this neglected area of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Based on a contextualization of Ficino’s letters to Giovanni d’Aragona, four manuscripts produced at the Aragonese library and other pieces of evidence such as Pierantonio Caracciolo’s Farsa de l’Imagico and Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue Actius, it argues that the works and ideas of Marsilio Ficino did circulate at king Ferrante’s court, but were criticized by Giovanni Pontano and his elite of followers. In particular, the essay provides new evidence about the existence of a Ficinian workshop based at the King’s library, and about some of its protagonists such as the scribe and scholar Ippolito Lunense.

From Lost Laughter to Latin Philosophy: On the Beginnings of Neapolitan Humanism

The first part of this essay explores some of the reasons why Neapolitan humanism continued to have a difficult standing throughout the twentieth century, and how scholars of the Neapolitan Renaissance sought to overcome these difficulties. The principal argument will be that modern scholars have circumscribed the character of Neapolitan humanism mainly by adopting paradigms developed in the context of Northern Italian, and especially Florentine humanism. In the second part, a different approach is endorsed. As is argued, the intellectual outlook of Neapolitan humanism was molded rather by conflicts among the humanists than by a stance common to all of them. Therefore, the main question is not the Neapolitan “brand” of humanism, but the role of Neapolitan humanists within the humanist movement as a whole. This point is illustrated by sketches of some of the controversies involving the first generation of humanists at court, namely Antonio Beccadelli, known as Panormita, Bartolomeo Facio, and Lorenzo Valla. Their struggles heavily influenced the intellectual outlook and philosophical style of Giovanni Pontano, the key figure of Neapolitan humanism in the second half of the fifteenth century.