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44 results

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The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch
  • Edited by Albert Russell Ascoli, Unn Falkeid
  • Published online:
    05 November 2015
    Print publication:
    24 November 2015
  • Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74), best known for his influential collection of Italian lyric poetry dedicated to his beloved Laura, was also a remarkable classical scholar, a deeply religious thinker and a philosopher of secular ethics. In this wide-ranging study, chapters by leading scholars view Petrarch's life through his works, from the epic Africa to the Letter to Posterity, from the Canzoniere to the vernacular epic Triumphi. Petrarch is revealed as the heir to the converging influences of classical cultural and medieval Christianity, but also to his great vernacular precursor, Dante, and his friend, collaborator and sly critic, Boccaccio. Particular attention is given to Petrach's profound influence on the Humanist movement and on the courtly cult of vernacular love poetry, while raising important questions as to the validity of the distinction between medieval and modern and what is lost in attempting to classify this elusive figure.

  • 12 - Machiavelli and poetry

  • Edited by John M. Najemy, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    24 June 2010, pp 190-205

  • Summary

    Machiavelli's reputation rests above all on his political-historical writings, and secondarily on his notable contribution to the re-emergence of classicizing comic drama. Yet, as scholarship has increasingly shown, he was also profoundly engaged with poetry and poets, as reader and writer. This chapter focuses attention on four interrelated dimensions of Machiavelli's engagement with poetry: the “poetic” dimensions of the nonpoetic works (citations of and allusions to poetry, use of poetic devices and strategies); the poems he wrote; the poets he read (and more or less obliquely rewrote); and his “poetics,” that is, his concept(s) of what poetry is and what it does, and its relationship to other modes of discourse, particularly the political historical. What Machiavelli's “realism” consists of is a source of ongoing scholarly debate. The general perception that he had little patience for the world of imaginative fictions remains alive and well among readers of The Prince and the Discourses. For such readers, the fact that Machiavelli frequently names poets and allusively echoes poetry in these nonpoetic works has commonly been dismissed as attributable, on the one hand, to the fundamentally literary-rhetorical character of upper-class education in his time (which was immersed in classical Latin literature), and, on the other, to the increasing importance assigned by Florentine culture to its vernacular literary heritage, above all the newly canonized “three crowns” of the fourteenth century: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

Dante and the Making of a Modern Author
  • Albert Russell Ascoli
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 March 2008
  • Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri – minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet – into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

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