Rinascimento

The monastery of the Badia Fiesolana on the outskirts of Florence has often been seen as a secondary project of the Medici. However new research has shown that the family's involvement in its financial, cultural, intellectual, religious and artistic affairs is central to its development under Cosimo and Lorenzo de'Medici during the 15th century. In the remarkable setting of the Badia, where art and architectural structure was studied anew, erudite abbots encountered learned humanists. The proceedings of a conference held in 2013 shed new light on cultural and scholarly life in and around Florence. Angela Dressen is Andrew W. Mellon Librarian at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Klaus Pietschmann is Professor for Musicology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz.

Shortly before his death in 1464 Cosimo de' Medici devoted himself to creating a great scholarly library at the Badia Fiesolana, located between the two Medici Villas at Fiesole and Careggi. Under Lorenzo the Magnificent, who enthusiastically continued his grandfather's enterprise, the library became celebrated as one of the meeting places of a Literary Academy, frequented by such luminaries as Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who both composed important works there. The library had been stocked by the famous bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci with more than 200 manuscripts. The formation of this library is exceptional in two ways. Firstly, the enormous speed of stocking the library within two years is unparalleled in Italy, and secondly the acquisition policy, which followed the bibliographic canon of pope Nicholas V, while carefully modifying it so as to support scholarly studies at a university level. Thus the Badia Fiesolana possessed the only library exclusively offering purposely chosen titles. The inventory of about 1464 is here published for the first time. In shedding new light on a humanist lyceum, this study closely scrutinizes humanist and university education in Florence and Italy. It provides a comparative treatment of university and monastic teaching, discussing both courses and library inventories.

Una breve rassegna bibliografica sul recupero di antichi testi filosofici pagani nell’Europa del Rinascimento, che si propone di indicare il momento in cui cominciarono a circolare i maggiori testi e le fonti relative alle scuole filosofiche antiche e quali traduttori e commentatori ne determinarono l’iniziale ricezione. Un’indagine utile a quanti studiano il ruolo del pensiero filosofico antico nella teologia, filosofia, teoria politica, letteratura e arte del Rinascimento e della prima età moderna.

After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretiusâe(tm)s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers. Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God. Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europeâe(tm)s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century. This heterodoxy circulated in the premodern world, not on the conspicuous stage of heresy trials and public debates, but in the classrooms, libraries, studies, and bookshops where quiet scholars met the ideas that would soon transform the world. Renaissance readersâe"poets and philologists rather than scientistsâe"were moved by their love of classical literature to rescue Lucretius and his atomism, thereby injecting his theories back into scientific discourse. Palmer employs a new quantitative method for analyzing marginalia in manuscripts and printed books, exposing how changes in scholarly reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century gradually expanded Europeâe(tm)s receptivity to radical science, setting the stage for the scientific revolution.

The first modern edition of the Instituzione d’ogni stato lodevole delle donne cristiane (1575), and the Ricordi di Monsignor Agostino Valier Vescovo di Verona lasciati alle monache nella sua visitazione fatta l’anno del santissimo Giubileo 1575 (1575) by Cardinal Agostino Valier (Venice, 7 April 1531 – Rome, 23 May 1606).
The Instituzione includes three texts meant respectively for unmarried women, widows, and married women (Del modo di vivere delle vergini che si chiamano demesse; Della vera e perfetta viduità; Instruzione delle donne maritate), while the Ricordi is a book for nuns on monastic life.
The texts by Agostino Valier are an important example of conduct literature for and about women in Counter-Reformation Italy.
Contents include: a historical introduction to the author and his works; the Italian texts with notes; an index of names cited in the treatises; a bibliography.

Jacopo Sadoleto (Modena 1477-Roma 1547), umanista e segretario dei brevi di Leone X, vescovo di Carpentras e cardinale per volontà di Paolo III, fu filosofo, pedagogo, teologo, ma anche poeta. L’esperienza poetica di Sadoleto, seppur limitata al decennio 1503-1513, ossia agli anni del pontificato di Giulio II, assicura al letterato una fama per certi versi più duratura e unanime delle opere filosofiche o religiose. La sua produzione poetica comprende una manciata di componimenti neolatini, di cui si offre per la prima volta un’edizione critica completa con traduzione italiana (a cura di Elena Spangenberg Yanes): i poemetti esametrici Curtius e De Laocoontis statua, l’epistola metrica Ad Federicum Fregusium, e un epigramma in endecasillabi faleci edito nella silloge dei Coryciana. La lettura e l’interpretazione dei carmi consente di gettare nuova luce su una fase della vita e della scrittura di Sadoleto tradizionalmente trascurata, ossia gli anni precedenti al suo ingresso nella Curia leonina, ma anche sull’umanesimo romano prima del Sacco del 1527, sulla Roma delle accademie e dei cenacoli che si radunavano intorno a personalità come Egidio da Viterbo, Oliviero Carafa, Angelo Colocci, i fratelli Ottaviano e Federico Fregoso. Inoltre, l’analisi della ricezione dell’immagine di Sadoleto quale poeta e teorico di poesia in due testi legati all’ambiente gesuitico (il dialogo De tragoedia di Bernardino Stefonio e le Prolusiones Academicae di Famiano Strada) permette di offrire un significativo esempio della transizione e della evoluzione dei valori della tradizione umanistica tra Accademia romana e Collegio Romano.