1st Edition

Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy Selected Articles

By John Monfasani Copyright 1994
    353 Pages
    by Routledge

    Language was the Italian humanists’ stock-in-trade, rhetoric their core discipline. In this volume Professor Monfasani collects together his most important articles on these subjects. One group of these, including two review essays, focuses specifically on the humanist Lorenzo Valla and on his philosophy of language. The third section of the book opens out the coverage of Italian Renaissance cultural history and includes studies of several new texts - among them a description of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, and a call for press censorship - and of the religious culture of mid-15th-century Rome. Le langage était l’instrumet de base des humanistes italiens, la rhétorique leur discipline de fond. Dans ce volume, le professeur Monfasani rassemble ses articles les plus importants sur le sujet . Un groupe d’entre eux, comprenant deux comptesrendus, se concentre spécifiquement sur l’humaniste Lorenzo Valla et sur sa philosophie du langage. La troisième section du recueil élargit le champ de connaissance de l’histoire culturelle de la Renaissance italienne et inclus des études de plusieurs textes nouveaus - parmi ceux-ci, une description de la décoration intérieure de la chapelle Sixtine et un appel à la censure de la presse -, ainsi que de la culture religieuse romaine au milieu du 15e siècle.

    Contents: Humanism and rhetoric; Three notes on Renaissance rhetoric; Episodes of anti-Quintilianism in the Italian Renaissance: quarrels on the orator as a Vir bonus and rhetoric as the Scientia bene dicendi; Was Lorenzo Valla an ordinary language philosopher?; Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola; Review of Laurentii Valle Repastinatio Dialectice et Philosophie, ed. G. Zippel; Review of Laurentii Valle De Professione Religiosorum, ed. M. Cortesi; A description of the Sistine Chapel under Pope Sixtus IV; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in mid-quattrocento Rome; For the history of Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato: the revision mistakenly attributed to Ambrogio Flandino, Simon Grynaeus’ revision of 1532, and the anonymous revision of 1556/1557; The first call for press censorship: Niccolò Perotti, Giovanni Andrea Bussi, Antonio Moreto, and the editing of Pliny’s Natural History; Calfurnio’s identification of pseudepigrapha of Ognibene, Fenestella, and Trebizond, and his attack on Renaissance commentaries; Bernardo Giustiniani and Alfonso de Palencia: their hands and some new humanists texts and translations; The Fraticelli and clerical wealth in quattrocento Rome; Addenda and corrigenda; Indices.