The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance

Description

The Renaissance in Italy continues to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination and on scholarly enquiry. This Companion presents a lively, comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and current approach to the period that extends in Italy from the turn of the fourteenth century through the latter decades of the sixteenth. Addressed to students, scholars, and non-specialists, it introduces the richly varied materials and phenomena as well as the different methodologies through which the Renaissance is studied today both in the English-speaking world and in Italy. The chapters are organized around axes of humanism, historiography, and cultural production, and cover a wide variety of areas including literature, science, music, religion, technology, artistic production, and economics. The diffusion of the Renaissance throughout Italian territories is emphasized. Overall, the Companion provides an essential overview of a period that witnessed both a significant revalidation of the classical past and the development of new, vernacular, and increasingly secular values.

Michael Wyatt is an independent scholar. His work is engaged with the pre-modern cultural histories of Italy, England and France, particularly questions of translation as both a textual practice and a socio-political phenomenon. He is the author of The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (2005) and co-edited (with Deanna Shemek) Writing Relations, American Scholars in Italian Archives: Essays for Franca Nardelli Petrucci and Armando Petrucci (2008). He is currently working on a second monograph, John Florio and the Circulation of Stranger Cultures in Early Stuart Britain, a critical edition of Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne, The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses, and he is an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy.

'These [essays] are not merely well-written outlines of specific topics, but provide access to rare sources and offer refreshing insights and interdisciplinary connections ... In a word, literature, in the Renaissance, is encyclopaedic. And the Companion lavishly demonstrates this through its sheer thematic variety.' Nicola Gardini, The Times Literary Supplement