Italian Renaissance Research Articles

Dialect levelling and merchant writing in Renaissance Italy

Abstract This article aims to assess the extent to which merchant language in Renaissance Italy can be said to have undergone a process of dialect levelling. Merchant letters in the Italian context are characterised by their high degree of verb allomorphy, both verbal and nominal. Previous investigations have shown that this degree of allomorphy is much more present in merchant texts than in other text genres immediately preceding codification in the 1500s. This article continues this line of research, showing how a process of dialect levelling occurs in a corpus of merchant writing sent from Milan in the late 1300s and early 1400s. Specifically, it focuses on 1pl. verb endings and the presence of voicing in past participles to show that Tuscan linguistic items infiltrated and then spread into neighbouring dialectal areas, such as Gallo-Italian, that is typologically distinct from Tuscan. Since this process of levelling was occurring at the same time as literary Tuscan was spreading, sometimes mediated also by merchants, the article also discusses these issues. While focus is placed on the contribution of merchant language in Renaissance Italy, the article can be seen as a case-study as evidence of language evolution ‘from below’. Overall, it argues that historical sociolinguistics provide powerful tools which help to show the various processes identified during standardization.

THE ART COLLECTION OF PAVEL VYAZEMSKY (1820-1881): ASPECTS OF HISTORY

Among many collections that form the basis of Russian museums, the collection of diplomat and writer Prince Pavel Vyazemsky (1820-1888) is a rare illustration of the interest in the works of the early Italian Renaissance, masters of the Northern Renaissance, which is more common among European collectors. In this article, the author dwells on the history of this collection, based on archival data available at the moment. Circumstances that contributed to the splitting of the collection after the Russian Revolution of 1917 seem to be crucial in this case.

The contribution of an outsider’s complementary assets to ecosystem emergence: Aldus Manutius and the printing industry in Renaissance Italy

Management and entrepreneurship literature have paid scant attention to the actors and activities transforming an industry into an ecosystem – that is, expanding the type of actors involved in product creation. To explore this important aspect, we investigate the role of Aldus Manutius – an influential and widely respected printer and editor in Renaissance Italy – in transforming the preindustrial printing industry into a modern ecosystem comprised not only of market actors such as printers and distributors, but also non-market ones such as humanist scholars. These non-market relationships and the activities that they facilitated constituted critical ‘complementary assets’ for the success of the Aldine printing press. We identify and classify the actors and activities that added to the business value proposition. By delivering the most comprehensive reconstruction of Manutius’ networks to date, this study illustrates the role of an outsider’s complementary assets in the transformation of an industry into an ecosystem.

Swift's Alberti? The Geometrical Comedy of Gulliver's Travels

This article propounds that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels develops a geometrical comedy in the Albertinian fashion. Starting with a specific reference to Momus in Puppet-Show, it will be maintained that Swift refers to an earlier tradition of criticism and transfers it to his prose writing. To explore this point, the article will draw on the Italian Renaissance humanist, satirist, and architect Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus and De Pictura. It will be suggested that there is a corollary between the exilic vision of the picaresque anti-hero and the definitive quality of the centric ray which establishes the centre of meaning in painting in Alberti. In accordance, it will be maintained that Swift adapts Alberti’s critical rendition of the Momus story as a geometrical metaphor for linear perspective. Although Momus does not directly appear as part of the dramatis personae in Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver emerges as an eighteenth-century successor to Alberti’s geometrical designs since Swift adapts the Renaissance humanist’s method of geometrical optics which reveres ocularcentrism. By these standards, it will be propounded that this method informs the comedic programme of Gulliver’s Travels. In accordance, the conclusion draws on the point that Swiftian comedy owes a considerable debt to the mimetic concerns of Renaissance humanism which signals at the birth of a post-humanist comedy through a re-mapping of Albertinian perspectivism.

Exploring Women's Health and Medical Treatment in Renaissance Italy Through Giovanni Marinello's Treatise

This article looks at a 16th-century medical book called Le medicine partenenti alle infermità delle donne by Giovanni Marinello (Venice, 1574), who wrote it intending to assist midwives and other delivery attendants in improving their professional practices. It is a very successful text that serves as an illustration of the rich body of treatises on women's diseases that were published in Europe in the sixteenth century and up until the first half of the seventeenth and which, despite disagreements and controversies, reflect a rekindled and passionate interest in medicine for the uniqueness of the female body that is beginning to diverge from the scholastic view of woman as an imperfect male. In addition, Marinello's work depicts the nature of contemporary daily life. It provides in great detail natural cures for sterility issues and all conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, always within the bounds of what is reasonable for a period defined by the ideas of the Council of Trent. The writings of Giovanni Marinello on women's diseases and cosmetics have two main advantages: first, they present traditional medical notions about female physiology and pathology in a way that is understandable through the use of colloquial language and an unpretentious style; second, they provide invaluable information on aspects of daily life. A significant portion of this practical book, which contains both prescribing and discursive material, is devoted to issues related to health and disease, the look of the body in life, pain, and methods to address these issues. Discussions include the human obligation to compete with natural rules, reflections on aesthetic canons and goals, and the interaction between nature and art or technology. The analysis of Marinello's texts focuses on both the form and the substance to make them accessible to a primarily female readership. The purpose of Marinello's three books, organized in a chronological order that starts with marriage and ends with childbirth, is to inform women of all the methods for maintaining their bodies and posses-sions. In the first book, we discuss eliminating all the annoying obstacles like urinary incontinence or lousy breath while discussing various sterility therapies in the seco- nd and pregnancy and childbirth in the third one. Despite the abundance of graphic and comprehensive erotic counsel, Marinello always sees it as an essential medical treatise while guaranteeing procreation. Mari- nello consequently highlights women's health through reproduction to safeguard the marriage and family unit. In addition to viewing health as the outcome of humoral balance, me- dieval medicine, based on the Hippocratic idea of humor, also consi- dered that physicians were responsible for aiding in the redemption of the soul alongside preachers (Jacquart & Thomasset, 1989; Lan, 1970). Especially when we consider that medical texts were written in Latin, a preferred language for disseminating science, until well into the seven- teenth and even the eighteenth century, the healing of diseases was associated with an unquestionable hermeticism, only accessible to spe- cialists, never to patients' objectives. As a counterpart to the idea of a Latin language associated with science, this study aims to present a guided reading of a work written in Italian, Le medicine partenenti alle enfermità delle donne, by Giovanni Marinello, the first to use his lan- guage instead of scientific Latin.

Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age, by Camilla Russell

<i>Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age</i>, by Camilla Russell

Italian Renaissance Food

Italian Renaissance Food

Form and Matter of Regular Geometrical Bodies in Luca Pacioli’s Summa (1494) and Compendium de divina proportione (1498)

Abstract Luca Pacioli (ca. 1447–1517) is widely considered a central figure in the Italian Renaissance, particularly in the history of practical mathematics. The perspectival representations of geometrical bodies that Leonardo da Vinci drew for Pacioli’s Compendium de divina proportione are, in turn, often singled out to illustrate the relationships between the visual arts and mathematics in the late fifteenth century. Yet despite increasing scholarly attention, the philosophical framework of Pacioli’s works deserves to be further explored. This paper discusses how Pacioli ably developed his arguments on regular geometrical bodies by relying on a predominantly Aristotelian philosophical framework. In this way, Pacioli established correlations among the quantitative, material, and formal properties of regular geometrical bodies, concluding with the visualisation of their (geometrically defined) form at the level of the intellect.

Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age by Camilla Russell (review)

Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age by Camilla Russell (review)

Rewriting Catullus 63 in Renaissance Italy

Rewriting Catullus 63 in Renaissance Italy

Censorship, industry structure, and creativity: evidence from the Catholic Inquisition in Renaissance Venice

Censorship, industry structure, and creativity: evidence from the Catholic Inquisition in Renaissance Venice

Analyzing Monarchy and Republicanism in Machiavelli's The Prince: A Corpus-Based Study of Political Representations

This research filled a research gap in the utilization of corpus and discourse analysis in The Prince. Niccol Machiavellis paramount treatise, The Prince, persists in generating scholarly discourse and contentious discussions due to its forthright examination of political expediency within the turbulent milieu of Renaissance Italy. Although Machiavelli's impact permeates the discipline of political science, the preponderance of examinations of his oeuvre has been conducted from political and philosophical perspectives, resulting in a dearth of analysis from a linguistic standpoint. Traditional discourse analysis has played a critical role in investigating attitudes, but it tends to focus on a small number of texts only, which leads to concerns from the perspective of statistics. This study aims to use a new prevailing method combining corpus-based research with manual text analysis, to investigate Machiavellis attitudes toward Republics, by analyzing his famous work The Prince. An analytical model based on the attitude schema is proposed to explicate the strategies for encoding attitudes. Analysis shows that Machiavellis attitudes towards Republicanism are characterized by a series of positive judgments of propriety, creating a positive image of Republicanism, whereas when Republicanism is mentioned, his attitudes are characterized by his favor. It is found that negative attitudes are always expressed implicitly by recounting events that elicit the attitudes (i.e. behaviors of the monarchies or republics) and performing speech acts that are motivated by the attitudes.

Building more mathematico in Renaissance Venice

In the mid-fifteenth century, Venice inherited Cardinal Bessarione’s collection of ancient manuscripts, an exceptional legacy that contributed to the renewal of mathematical studies. This essay outlines the spread of mathematics in Venice in the early Renaissance, when scholars actively discussed Euclid and universal proportions. Based on this cultural context, the author briefly analyzes the role of polyhedra and an example of the application of proportions to architecture: the church of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. This church is an interesting and rare case of ‘declared’ application of proportions to architecture, since we have specific indications in Francesco Zorzi’s memorandum written in 1535.

POLITICAL MENTALIZATION OF THE FRENCH RULING ELITES: A POLITICAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL ESSAY

The study focuses on the main stages of the historical past of French civilization, in the depths of which the political mentality of the ruling elites was formed. The authors explore the mental and civilizational results of the five-hundred-year Romanization of Gaul. The role of Christian proselytism in the formation of a monotheistic mentality and the political role of the Church of Gaul are revealed. The thesis about the mental heritage of the Roman Empire in the formation of the foundations of the new Christian nation is revealed. As a result of the convergence of Roman culture and barbaric cults, an original mental space was formed, where Catholicism became the state religion of the Frankish Empire. The conclusion is made about the historical and mental-political significance of chivalry not only for France, but also for Europe. Next, the authors turned to the topic of the influence of the Renaissance on the elites, who, having assimilated the mental models of the Italian Renaissance, built their national identity on their basis. In the Renaissance epoch, the centuries-old theologo-political nature of French political power was transformed into a subject-pragmatic system of absolutism. For the first time in the history of Europe, politics was separated from religion. Christian dogmas as the basic mental attitudes of the elites have given way to the sense-generating primacy of secular principles of real politics. During this period, anti-absolutist and anticlerical mental and political attitudes emerged in the elite environment on the soil cultivated by the Renaissance, which determined the course and nature of the revolutionary events of the 18th-19th centuries. During the period of the Consulate and the First Empire, Napoleon I and then his followers pursued a policy of mental reconstruction of the elites. The final two sections talk about the philosophical, theological and scientific heritage of the great intellectuals of France, the power activities of its outstanding rulers, who had a significant impact on the evolution and development of the political mentality of modern French elites.

Redating the arrival of Tropaeolum minus in Italy

At a European level, Tropaeolum minus is the first species of this genus that arrived in our continent, around 1570, immediately used as an ornamental, vegetable and pharmaceutical plant. According to Italian sources, instead, T. minus arrived in Italy only in 1642: the species of this genus which was known in Italy at the time was T. majus, imported in 1596. However, in the Italian Renaissance herbaria, there are four specimens dated to the last decades of 1500, clearly recognisable as T. minus, which would confirm its import around 1570. Thanks to the analysis of these herbarium specimens and documental sources of the second half of the XVI century (Ulisse Aldrovandi’s manuscripts and watercolour plates, the lists of species cultivated in that period in the principal Italian botanical gardens, the manuscript code I cinque libri di piante by Pietro Antonio Michiel), it is possible to demonstrate that the arrival of T. minus in Italy has to be redated at the second half of the XVI century. Furthermore, this work allowed the specimens of Tropaeolum preserved in the Erbario Aldrovandi to be identified correctly, which were formerly attributed to T. majus following the Italian scientific literature available so far.Graphical abstract

Political Obligation and Self-Sufficiency in Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People

Abstract Leonardo Bruni (1377–1444), chancellor of Florence, is today more famous as an initiator of civic humanism and a proponent of early modern republicanism than as a historian of medieval Florence. He owes this position most of all to Hans Baron, who argued that Florentine civic humanism—an exemplary mode of communal existence dedicated to the active life—as found particularly in Bruni's writings, stemmed from the resurgence of interest in antiquity, which pointed forward to a liberating, civilizing, and progressive modernity. Though James Hankins has recently argued that the dual theses of civic humanism and republicanism are mischaracterizations of the larger thrust of Italian Renaissance political thought, the scholarly literature overwhelmingly portrays Leonardo Bruni as incipiently modern and, by definition, un-medieval. But in emphasizing the role of antiquity in Bruni's “modern” thought, scholars have overlooked the importance of medieval history in the formulation and the content of Bruni's arguments. This article seeks to rectify this misappreciation by demonstrating how that quintessential medieval struggle, the conflict between popes and emperors, plays a central role in Bruni's political thought as it is found in the History of the Florentine People, written from 1415/16 to 1444.

The Tax Return (1515) of Marin Sanudo: Fiscality, Family, and Language in Renaissance Venice

ABSTRACT Marin Sanudo’s finances, family relationships, and choice of written vernacular are the three focal points of the present study. These hitherto only partially explored issues are addressed via a little known primary source. Sanudo’s handwritten submission for the Venetian redecima tax survey initiated in May 1514 is offered here in a philological first edition, with translation and contextualisation. His tax return discloses precise information about his housing interests, retail outlets, and overall income. It adds to our knowledge of the living arrangements in Ca’ Sanudo at S. Giacomo dell’Orio and suggests both tensions and collaboration within the Sanudo clan. Linguistically the document is intriguing. Cross comparison confirms that Sanudo’s written vernacular is not the linguistic impasto familiar from his historical works. His prose is revealed as less hybrid here than anywhere else in his output, with spelling, phonology, morphology, and lexis leaning strongly towards Venetian, and with Tuscan traits unobtrusive.

Impact Of “Rise of Burgher Class” On Art: Italian Renaissance Painting

Impact Of “Rise of Burgher Class” On Art: Italian Renaissance Painting

The Comic Dynamic in Italian Renaissance Literature

Review of Massimo Scalabrini, Commedia e civiltà. Dinamiche anticonflittuali nella letteratura italiana del Cinquecento. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2022.

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science VERITRACE will enhance our understanding of the role of ancient wisdom writings in the development of early modern natural philosophy by employing state-of-the-art digital techniques on a large corpus of early modern texts. The project charts the spread of this discourse from Renaissance Italy to early modern Europe and identifies watershed moments in the reception of these ancient wisdom writings.