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2 - Renaissance Antihero: Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus, the Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

George McClure
Affiliation:
University of Alabama
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Summary

This chapter focuses on Leon Battista Alberti's comic novel Momus, placing it in the context of Lucian's Momus, Boccaccio's depiction of the god in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, and the recent revival of Lucretius and Hermetic sources in Renaissance humanism. This chapter contextualizes the novel in terms of Alberti's corpus, including Profugiorum ab erumna, Theogenius, De commodis litterarum atque incommodis, De re aedificatoria, Della famiglia, Life of Saint Potitus, and the Intercenales. It argues that Alberti's Momus may have been not simply a critique or princes, popes, or court life (as others have argued), but a thinly disguised assault on religious belief.
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Chapter
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Doubting the Divine in Early Modern Europe
The Revival of Momus, the Agnostic God
, pp. 34 - 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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