Villa I Tatti

Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage explores the intellectual world of Berenson (1865–1959), who put the connoisseurship of Renaissance art on a firm footing at the turn of the twentieth century. Essays explore his relationships with various cultural figures including William James, Jean Paul Richter, Katherine Dunham, and many others.

Sassetta, the subtle genius from Siena, revolutionized Italian painting with an altarpiece for the small Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro in 1437–1444. This book solves the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of this masterwork’s reconstruction and, on a firm scientific foundation, restores it to its vivid historical context.

The twenty-two essays collected here delve into recent research on the development of humanism and art in the Hungary of King Matthias Corvinus and his successors. Richly illustrated with new photography, this book eloquently documents and explores the unique role played by the Hungarian court in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe.

The two richly illustrated volumes of Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors demonstrate Villa I Tatti’s role as the world’s leading center for Italian Renaissance studies. Gathered to honor I Tatti’s director from 2002 to 2010, the 177 essays represent the cutting edge of Renaissance scholarship in art history, literature, music, and more.

The Medici: Citizens and Masters offers a novel, comparative approach to examining Medici power and influence in Florence. Contributors from diverse perspectives set Medici rule against princely states such as Milan and Ferrara, and they ask how much the Medici changed Florence, contrasting their supremacy with earlier Florentine regimes.

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection illuminates many previously unexplored aspects of the Basilica of San Lorenzo’s history, extending from its Early Christian foundation to the modern era. San Lorenzo depicts this church as a living Florentine institution, continually reshaped by complex historical forces.

One of the leading humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) has been praised as a brilliant debunker of medieval scholastic philosophy. In this book Lodi Nauta seeks a more balanced assessment, presenting us with the first comprehensive analysis of the humanist’s attempt at radical reform of Aristotelian scholasticism.

Alison Brown demonstrates how Florentine thinkers used Lucretius—earlier and more widely than has been supposed—to provide a radical critique of prevailing orthodoxies. She enhances our understanding of the “revolution” in sixteenth-century political thinking and our definition of the Renaissance within newly discovered worlds and new social networks.

This innovative microhistory of a fascinating yet neglected city shows how its loyalty to Venice was tested by military attack, economic downturn, and demographic collapse. Despite these trials, Brescia experienced cultural revival and political transformation, which Stephen Bowd uses to explain state formation in a powerful region of Renaissance Italy.

Leonardo Bruni is widely recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. Gary Ianziti undertakes a systematic work-by-work investigation of the full range of Bruni’s output in history and biography, and assesses in detail the impact of the Greek historians on humanist methods of historical writing.

The Duke and the Stars explores science and medicine as studied and practiced in fifteenth-century Italy, including how astrology was taught in relation to astronomy. It illustrates how the “predictive art” of astrology was often a critical, secretive source of information for Italian Renaissance rulers, particularly in times of crisis.

In 1482 Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over 100 folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse interleaved with lavishly engraved maps. Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography.

Renaissance debates about politics and gender led to pioneering forms of poor relief, devised to help women get a start in life. These included orphanages for illegitimate children and forced labor in workhouses, but also women’s shelters and early forms of maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and credit union savings plans.

Italian sermons tell a story of the Reformation that credits preachers with using the pulpit, pen, and printing press to keep Italy Catholic when the region’s violent religious wars made the future uncertain, and with fashioning a post-Reformation Catholicism that would survive the competition and religious choice of their own time and ours.

In the sixteenth century, the city-state of Florence failed. In its place the Medicis created a principality, becoming first dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany. The Fruit of Liberty analyzes the slow transformations that predated and facilitated the institutional shift from republic to principality, from citizen to subject.

In the first half of the fifteenth century, Rome and the papal court were caught between conflicting realities—between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, conciliarism and papalism, an image of a restored republic and a dream of a papal capital. Elizabeth McCahill explores the transformation of Rome’s ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.

This record of Florentine musician Jacopo Peri’s wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe’s principal centers of capitalism.

In explaining an improbable liaison and its consequences, A Mattress Maker’s Daughter explores changing concepts of love and romance, new standards of public and private conduct, and emerging attitudes toward property and legitimacy just as the age of Renaissance humanism gives way to the Counter Reformation and Early Modern Europe.

Dispelling the myth that Florentine politics offered only negative lessons, Mark Jurdjevic shows that significant aspects of Machiavelli’s political thought were inspired by his native city. Machiavelli’s contempt for Florence’s shortcomings was a direct function of his considerable estimation of the city’s unrealized political potential.

Cosimo dei Medici stabilized ducal finances, secured his borders, doubled his territory, attracted scholars and artists to his court, academy, and universities, and dissipated fractious Florentine politics. These triumphs were far from a foregone conclusion, as Gregory Murry shows in this study of how Cosimo crafted his image as a sacral monarch.

Using four notorious moments in the life of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, Valeria Finucci explores changing early modern concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and aging. She deftly marries salacious tales with historical analysis to tell a broader story of Italian Renaissance cultural adjustments and obsessions.

Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance poets and philologists, not scientists, rescued Lucretius and his atomism theory. 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 transformative ideas.

Meredith Ray shows that women were at the vanguard of empirical culture during the Scientific Revolution. They experimented with medicine and alchemy at home and in court, debated cosmological discoveries in salons and academies, and in their writings used their knowledge of natural philosophy to argue for women’s intellectual equality to men.

Revealing an Italian Renaissance beyond Michelangelo and the Medici, Sarah Gwyneth Ross recovers the experiences of everyday people who were inspired to pursue humanistic learning. Physicians were often the most avid professionals seeking to earn the respect of their betters, advance their families, and secure honorable remembrance after death.

Dag Nikolaus Hasse shows how ideological and scientific motives led to the decline of Arabic traditions in European culture. The Renaissance was a turning point: on the one hand, Arabic scientific traditions reached their peak of influence in Europe; on the other, during this period the West began to forget, or suppress, its debt to Arabic culture.

Roisin Cossar examines how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the Black Death. Despite reformers’ desire for clerics to remain celibate, clerical households resembled those of the laity, and priests’ lives included apprenticeships in youth, fatherhood in middle age, and reliance on their families in old age.

Unn Falkeid considers the work of six fourteenth-century writers who waged literary war against the Avignon papacy’s increasing claims of supremacy over secular rulers—a conflict that engaged contemporary critics from every corner of Europe. She illuminates arguments put forth by Dante, Petrarch, William of Ockham, Catherine of Siena, and others.

Giannozzo Manetti was one of the most remarkable figures of the Italian Renaissance, though today his works are unfamiliar in English. In this authoritative biography, the first ever in English, David Marsh guides readers through the vast range of Manetti’s writings, which epitomized the new humanist scholarship of the Quattrocento.

In Renaissance Italy women from all walks of life played a central role in health care and the early development of medical science. Observing that the frontlines of care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Sharon Strocchia encourages us to rethink women’s place in the history of medicine.

Salomone da Sesso was a virtuoso goldsmith in Renaissance Italy. Brought down by a sex scandal, he saved his skin by converting to Catholicism. Tamar Herzig explores Salamone’s world—his Jewish upbringing, his craft and patrons, and homosexuality. In his struggle for rehabilitation, we see how precarious and contested was the meaning of conversion.

After the composition of the Decameron, and under the influence of Petrarch’s humanism, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is Famous Women, the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women. This edition presents the first English translation based on the autograph manuscript of the Latin.

Bruni (1370–1444), the leading civic humanist of the Italian Renaissance, served as apostolic secretary to four popes (1405–1414) and chancellor of Florence (1427–1444). His History of the Florentine People is generally considered the first modern work of history. This edition makes it available for the first time in English translation.

Platonic Theology is the visionary and philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This work, translated into English for the first time, is a key to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

Momus is the most ambitious literary creation of Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist-scientist-artist and “universal man“ of the Italian Renaissance. In this dark comedy, written around 1450, Alberti charts the fortunes of his anti-hero Momus, god of criticism. This edition offers a new Latin text and the first full translation into English.

Cyriac of Ancona was among the first to study the physical remains of the ancient world in person and for that reason is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. Cyriac’s accounts of his travels, with their commentary reflecting his wide-ranging antiquarian, political, religious, and commercial interests, provide a fascinating record of the encounter of the Renaissance world with the legacy of classical antiquity. The Latin texts assembled for this edition have been newly edited and most of them appear here for the first time in English.

Here are four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the nascent humanist movement during the Italian Renaissance: Vergerio, “The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth; Bruni, “The Study of Literature”; Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), “The Education of Boys”; and Guarino, “A Program of Teaching and Learning.”

Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure in the circle of Lorenzo de’Medici, “il Magnifico,” in Florence. His “Silvae” are poetical introductions to his courses in literature at the University of Florence, written in Latin hexameters. They not only contain some of the finest Latin poetry of the Renaissance, but also afford unique insight into the poetical credo of a brilliant scholar as he considers the works of his Greek and Latin predecessors as well as of his contemporaries writing in Italian.

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), one of the greatest Italian poets, was also a leader in the Renaissance movement to revive ancient Roman language and literature. This new critical edition of the Invectives, intended to revive the eloquence of Cicero, are directed against scholastic philosophy and medicine and the dominance of French culture.

Manetti (1396–1459) was a leading humanist biographer of the Renaissance. This volume brings together his biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which helped establish the canon of Italian literature, and his parallel lives of Socrates and Seneca—the standard biographical sources for those philosophers throughout the early modern period.

Platonic Theology is the visionary and philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This work, translated into English for the first time, is a key to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

The most popular work of the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (1470–1555), On Discovery (De inventoribus rerum, 1499), was the first comprehensive account of discoveries and inventions written since antiquity. This is the first English translation of a critical edition based on the Latin texts published in Polydore Vergil’s lifetime.

The Commentaries of Pius II (1405–1464), the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius’s lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation.

Imprisoned for conspiring against Pope Paul II, Bartolomeo Platina (1421–1481) returned to favor under Pope Sixtus IV, and composed his most famous work, a biographical compendium of the Roman popes from St. Peter down to his own time. The work critically synthesized a wide range of sources and became the standard reference work on papal history for early modern Europe. This edition contains the first complete translation into English and an improved Latin text.

Flavio, humanist and historian, was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance recovery of classical antiquity. His Italia Illustrata, here for the first time in English, is a topographical work describing Italy region by region. A quintessential work of Renaissance antiquarianism, its aim is to explore the Roman roots of the Renaissance world.

Filelfo (1398–1481), one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance, was the principal humanist working in Lombardy in the middle of the Quattrocento and served as court poet to the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan. His Odes constitute the first complete cycle of Horatian odes since classical antiquity.

Platonic Theology is the visionary and philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This work, translated into English for the first time, is a key to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People in twelve books is generally considered the first modern work of history, and was widely imitated by humanist historians for two centuries after its official publication by the Florentine Signoria in 1442. This edition makes it available for the first time in English translation.

Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) was the best-selling author of the fifteenth century. His History of the Florentine People is generally considered the first modern work of history. This third volume concludes the edition, the first to make the work available in English translation. It includes Bruni’s Memoirs, an autobiographical account of the events of his lifetime, and cumulative indexes to the complete work.

The first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Famous Women affords a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential.

Platonic Theology is the visionary and philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This work, translated into English for the first time, is a key to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

Maffeo Vegio (1407–1458) was the outstanding Latin poet of the first half of the 15th century. This volume includes Book XIII of Vergil’s Aeneid, the famous continuation of the Roman epic, which was popular in the later Renaissance, printed many times and translated into every major European language. It also contains three other epic works.

A Socratic dialogue set in the court of King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary (ca. 1490), Republics and Kingdoms Compared depicts a debate between the king and a Florentine merchant at his court on the relative merits of republics and kingdoms. This is the first critical edition and the first translation into any language.

Poliziano was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance. This volume illuminates his close friendship with Pico della Mirandola and includes much of the correspondence about the composition and reception of his Miscellanies, a revolutionary work of philology. It also includes his famous letter on the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian as well. The History of Venice was published after Bembo’s death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, in three volumes, makes it available for the first time in English translation.

Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), scholar and critic, was one of the most admired Latinists of his day. The poems in this volume come from all periods of his life and reflect both his erudition and his wide-ranging friendships. This volume also includes the prose dialogue Etna, an account of Bembo’s ascent of Mt. Etna in Sicily during his student days.

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano was an important humanist and scholar of Renaissance Italy. He was also the most innovative and versatile Latin poet of Quattrocento Italy. His Two Books of Hendecasyllables, given the subtitle Baiae, are the elegant offspring of Pontano’s leisure, written to celebrate love, good wine, friendship, nature, and all the pleasures of life to be found at the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples.

Platonic Theology is the visionary and philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This work, translated into English for the first time, is a key to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

Platonic Theology is the visionary and philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This work, translated into English for the first time, is a key to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

Collected here, Vergerio’s Paulus, Philodoxeos fabula by Alberti, Philogenia et Epiphebus by Pisani, Chrysis by Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), and Medio’s Epirota span nearly the entire Quattrocento and are a valuable gauge of its changing literary tastes, tastes nourished by the ancient comic drama of Plautus and Terence.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), a student of canon law who became a Catholic cardinal, was widely considered the most important original philosopher of the Renaissance. He wrote principally on theology, philosophy, and church politics. This volume makes most of Nicholas’s other writings on Church and reform available in English for the first time.

Bembo (1470–1547), a Venetian nobleman, later a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the most celebrated Latin stylist of his day and was widely admired for his writings in Italian. Named official historian of Venice in 1529, Bembo began to compose in Latin his continuation of the city’s history in 12 books, covering the years from 1487–1513.

The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text and an updated translation.

Much of Pietro Bembo’s work is devoted to the external affairs of Venice, principally conflicts with other European states and with the Turks in the East. The History of Venice was published after his death, in Latin and in his own Italian version. This edition, completed by this third volume, makes it available for the first time in English translation.

The main literary dispute of the Renaissance pitted those Neo-Latin writers favoring Cicero alone as the apotheosis of Latin prose against those following an eclectic array of literary models. This Ciceronian controversy pervades the texts and letters collected for the first time in this volume.

Sannazaro (1456–1530) is most famous for having written the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this work, he devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an adaption of the eclogue form.

Teofilo Folengo (1491–1544) was a native of Mantua and a member of the Benedictine order, later to become a runaway monk and satirist. Blending Latin and various Italian dialects in a deliberately droll manner, Baldo follows a sort of French royal juvenile delinquent through imprisonment, fantastical adventures, and a journey to the underworld. This edition provides the first English translation of this hilarious send-up of the ancient epic and Renaissance chivalric romance traditions.

Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) was the most important theorist of the humanist movement. His most famous work is On the Donation of Constantine, an oration in which Valla uses new philological methods to attack the authenticity of the most important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal rule. It appears here in a new translation with introduction and notes by G. W. Bowersock, based on the critical text of Wolfram Setz.

The Hermaphrodite’s open celebration of vice, particularly sodomy, earned it public burnings, threats of excommunication, banishment to the closed sections of libraries, and a devoted following. Antonio Beccadelli combined the comic realism of Italian popular verse with the language of Martial to explore the underside of the early Renaissance.

Federico Borromeo founded the Ambrosiana library, art collection, and academy in Milan. Sacred Painting (1624) laid out the rules that artists should follow when creating religious art. Museum (1625) walked the reader through the Ambrosiana’s collection, offering some of the earliest critiques to survive on works by Leonardo, Titian, and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance. His most substantial work of poetry was his Three Books on Xandra. Also included in this volume is the “Carmina Varia,” a collection whose centerpiece is a group of elegies directed to the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo.

Scala (1430–1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show the influence of fellow humanists such as Ficino, Pope Pius II, and Pico della Mirandola.

Folengo (1491–1544) was born in Mantua and joined the Benedictine order, but became a runaway monk and satirist of monasticism. In 1517 he published—as “Merlin Cocaio”—the first version of his macaronic narrative poem Baldo. This edition provides the first English translation of this send-up of ancient epic and Renaissance chivalric romance.

Francesco Petrarca, one of the greatest of Italian poets, was also the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive ancient Roman language and literature. Petrarch’s four Invectives, written in Latin, were inspired by the eloquence of the great Roman orator Cicero. The new translations in this volume include the first English translation of three of the four invectives.

Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) was the leading theorist of the Renaissance humanist movement. In On the Donation of Constantine he uses new philological methods to attack the authenticity of the most important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal rule, in a brilliant analysis that is often seen as marking the beginning of modern textual criticism. This volume provides a new English translation with introduction and notes by G. W. Bowersock.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This volume contains Ficino’s extended analysis and commentary on the Phaedrus.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566), humanist and bishop, came to prominence as a Latin poet in the Rome of Leo X and Clement VII. Leo commissioned this famous epic, a retelling of the life of Christ in the style of Vergil, which was published in 1535. This translation, accompanied by extensive notes, is based on a new edition of the Latin text.

Edited here for the first time is Florentius de Faxolis’s music treatise for Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. The richly illuminated small parchment codex bears witness to the musical interests of the cardinal, himself an avid singer. The author’s unusual insights into the musical thinking of his day are discussed in the ample commentary.

The goal of Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods is to plunder ancient and medieval literary sources to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. This is volume 1 of a three-volume set of Boccaccio’s complete 15-book work. It contains a famous defense of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a Christian world.

The Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is Lorenzo Valla’s principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. Valla sought to replace the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic with a new logic based on the historical usage of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach.

Humanist Tragedies offers a sampling of Latin drama from the Tre- and Quattrocento. These five tragedies—Ecerinis, Achilleis, Progne, Hyempsal, and Fernandus Servatus—were nourished by a potent amalgam of classical, medieval, and pre-humanist sources. Humanist tragedy testifies to momentous changes in literary conventions during the Renaissance.

Lilio Gregorio Giraldi authored many works on literary history, mythology, and antiquities. Among the most famous are his dialogues, modeled on Cicero’s Brutus, translated here into English for the first time. The work gives a panoramic view of European poetry in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, concentrating above all on Italy.

The letters of Bartolomeo Fonzio—a leading literary figure in Florence of the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Machiavelli—are a window into the world of Renaissance humanism and classical scholarship. This first English translation includes the famous letter about the discovery on the Via Appia of the perfectly preserved body of a Roman girl.

The Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is Lorenzo Valla’s principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. Valla sought to replace the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic with a new logic based on the historical usage of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach.

Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. His commentaries remained the standard guide to the philosopher’s works for centuries. Maude Vanhaelen’s new translation of Parmenides makes this monument of metaphysics accessible to the modern student.

Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. His commentaries remained the standard guide to the philosopher’s works for centuries. Maude Vanhaelen’s new translation of Parmenides makes this monument of metaphysics accessible to the modern student.

Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), whose academic name was Gioviano, was the most important Latin poet of the fifteenth century as well as a leading statesman who served as prime minister to the Aragonese kings of Naples. His Dialogues are our best source for the humanist academy of Naples which Pontano led for several decades.

Michael Marullus (c. 1453/4–1500), born in Greece, began life as a mercenary soldier but became a prominent Neo-Latin poet and scholar in Italy. Later poets imitated him in vernacular love poetry, especially Ronsard. This edition contains Marullus’s complete Latin poetry. All of these works appear in English translation for the first time.

Paolo Giovio’s dialogue provides an informed perspective on the sack of Rome in 1527, from a friend of Pope Clement VII. The work discusses literary style and whether the vernacular could surpass Latin as a vehicle for literary expression. This volume includes a fresh edition of the Latin text and the first translation into English.

Francesco Filelfo’s On Exile depicts noblemen and humanists, driven from Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici, discussing the sufferings of exile—poverty and loss of reputation—and the best way to endure and profit from them. This volume contains the first complete edition of the Latin text and the first complete translation into any modern language.

A medical authority, Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553) was also a prominent Neo-Latin poet. This volume includes his didactic poem Syphilis, which gave the name to the disease and contains the first poetical description of Columbus’s discovery of America; a short Biblical epic, the Joseph; and the Carmina, a collection of shorter poetry.

Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) was the leading philologist of the first half of the fifteenth century, as well as a philosopher, theologian, and translator. His extant Latin letters, though few, afford a direct and unguarded window into the working life of the most passionate, difficult, and interesting of the Italian humanists.

Jacopo Zabarella’s two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which sciences should be taught and the method to be followed in demonstrations.

Jacopo Zabarella’s two treatises On Methods and On Regressus (1578) are among the most important Renaissance discussions of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted. They belong to a lively debate about the order in which sciences should be taught and the method to be followed in demonstrations.

Salutati’s first surviving treatise was written for a lawyer who entered a Florentine monastery and requested a piece encouraging him to persevere in religious life. On the World and Religious Life is a wide-ranging reflection on humanity’s misuse of God’s creation and the need to orient human life with a proper hierarchy of values.

Giovanni Pontano, the dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, wrote two brilliantly original poetical cycles. On Married Love is the first sustained exploration of married love in first-person poetry. Eridanus combines familiar motifs of courtly love with an allusive matrix of classical elegy and Pontano’s distinctive vision.

The defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy League fleet at Lepanto (1571) was among the most celebrated international events of the sixteenth century. The Battle of Lepanto anthologizes the work of twenty-two poets who composed Latin poetry in response to the news of the battle, the largest Mediterranean naval encounter since antiquity.

Coluccio Salutati was chancellor of the Florentine Republic and leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. He was among the first to apply his classical learning to political theory and his rhetorical skills to the defense of liberty. This volume contains a new English version of his political writings.

Brought to Florence by Lorenzo de’ Medici as a celebrity preacher, Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), a Dominican friar, would play a major role in the convulsive events that led to the overthrow of the Medici themselves. The Latin writings in this volume, all composed in the year before he was hanged, are translated into English for the first time.

In 1490/92 the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino made new translations of two treatises he believed were the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of St. Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. They are presented here in new critical editions accompanied by English translations, the first into any modern language.

Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452) was among the first to study the physical remains of the ancient world in person and is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. This volume contains a life of Cyriac to the year 1435 by his friend Francesco Scalamonti, along with several letters and other texts illustrating his early life.

In 1490/92 the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino made new translations of two treatises he believed were the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of St. Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. They are presented here in new critical editions accompanied by English translations, the first into any modern language.

Ugolino Verino was a principal Latin poet in the Florence of Lorenzo de’Medici and a leading figure in the revival of ancient Latin elegy. He forged a distinctive voice in a three-book cycle of poems in honor of his lady-love, Fiametta. His Paradise is a vision-poem in which he tours Heaven and the afterlife.

Giannozzo Manetti’s Apologeticus was a defense of the study of Hebrew and of the need for a new translation. It constituted the most extensive treatise on the art of translation of the Renaissance. This ITRL edition contains the first complete translation of the work into English.

Aldus Manutius was the most innovative scholarly publisher of the Renaissance. This ITRL edition contains all of his prefaces to his editions of the Greek classics, translated for the first time into English. They provide unique insight into the world of scholarly publishing in Renaissance Venice.

Giovanni Marrasio was esteemed in the Renaissance as the first to revive the ancient Latin elegy, and his Angelinetum, or “Angelina’s Garden,” and other poems explores that genre in all its variety, from love poetry, to a description of a court masque, to political panegyric, to poetic exchanges with famous humanists of the day.

Petrarch was the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive literary Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, and Greco-Roman culture in general. My Secret Book reveals a remarkable self-awareness as he probes and evaluates the springs of his own morally dubious addictions to fame and love.

Biondo Flavio was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity and popularized the term Middle Age to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of antiquity in his own time. Rome in Triumph is the capstone of his research program, addressing the question: What made Rome great?

Biondo Flavio was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity and popularized the term Middle Age to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of antiquity in his own time. Rome in Triumph is the capstone of his research program, addressing the question: What made Rome great?

Biondo Flavio was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity and popularized the term Middle Age to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of antiquity in his own time. Italy Illuminated is a topographical work exploring the Roman roots of Italy.

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), one of the greatest of Italian poets, was also the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive the cultural and moral excellence of ancient Greece and Rome. This two-volume set contains an ample, representative sample from his enormous and fascinating correspondence with all the leading figures of his day.

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), one of the greatest of Italian poets, was also the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive the cultural and moral excellence of ancient Greece and Rome. This two-volume set contains an ample, representative sample from his enormous and fascinating correspondence with all the leading figures of his day.

Aldus Manutius (c. 1451–1515) was the most important scholarly publisher of the Renaissance. His Aldine Press was responsible for more first editions of classical literature, philosophy, and science than any other publisher before or since. This volume presents Aldus’s prefaces to Latin classics and modern humanist writers, translated into English.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the leading Platonic philosopher of the Renaissance and is generally recognized as the greatest authority on ancient Platonism before modern times. The I Tatti edition of his commentary on Plotinus, in six volumes, contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation into any modern language.

Giannozzo Manetti’s apologia for Christianity—Against the Jews and the Gentiles—redefines religion as true piety and relates the historical development of the pagan and Jewish religions to the life of Jesus. This volume includes the first critical edition of Books I–IV and the first translation of those books into any modern language.

Much more than a mere compilation of pagan myths, Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods incorporates hundreds of excerpts from and comments on ancient poetry. It is both the most ambitious work of literary scholarship of the early Renaissance and a demonstration to contemporaries of the moral and cultural value of studying ancient poetry.

Commentaries by Pius II (1405–1464)—the only autobiography ever written by a pope—was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius’s lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation by Florence Alden Gragg.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the leading Platonic philosopher of the Renaissance and is generally recognized as the greatest authority on ancient Platonism before modern times. The I Tatti edition of his commentary on Plotinus, in 6 volumes, contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation into any modern language.

In Latin Poetry, the erudite and playful works of one of Italy’s greatest poets, Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), are translated into English for the first time. This I Tatti edition provides a newly collated Latin text and offers unique insight into the formation of one of the Renaissance’s foremost vernacular writers.

Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure in the Florence during the Age of the Medici. This I Tatti edition contains all of his Greek and Latin poetry (with the exception of the Silvae in ITRL 14) translated into English for the first time.

In On Human Worth and Excellence, celebrated diplomat, historian, philosopher, and scholar Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) asks: what are the moral, intellectual, and spiritual capabilities of the unique amalgam of body and soul that constitutes human nature? This I Tatti edition contains the first complete translation into English.

Giovanni Pontano, best known today as a Latin poet, also composed popular prose dialogues and essays. The De sermone, translated into English here for the first time as The Virtues and Vices of Speech, provides a moral anatomy of aspects of speech such as truthfulness, deception, flattery, gossip, bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule.

Lives of the Milanese Tyrants includes biographies of two dukes of Milan—the powerful Filippo Maria Visconti and the mercenary captain Francesco Sforza—written by the most important Milanese humanist of the early fifteenth century, Pier Candido Decembrio. Both works are translated into English here for the first time from new Latin texts.

In the Miscellanies, the great Italian Renaissance scholar-poet Angelo Poliziano penned two sets of mini-essays focused on lexical or textual problems. He solves these with his characteristic deep learning and brash criticism. The two volumes presented here are the first translation of both collections into any modern language.

In the Miscellanies, the great Italian Renaissance scholar-poet Angelo Poliziano penned two sets of mini-essays focused on lexical or textual problems. He solves these with his characteristic deep learning and brash criticism. The two volumes presented here are the first translation of both collections into any modern language.

Using a variety of analytical methods and theoretical approaches, this book moves food studies firmly into the arena of Late Medieval and Renaissance history, providing an essential key to deciphering the material and metaphorical complexity of this period in European, and especially Italian, history.

Dialogues, Volume 3 completes the I Tatti edition of Pontano’s five surviving dialogues. It includes Aegidius—which covers topics such as creation, free will, and the immortality of the soul—and Asinus, a fantastical comedy about Pontano going mad and falling in love with an ass. This is the first translation of these dialogues into English.

Dialogues, Volume 2 by Giovanni Gioviano Pontano contains both a perceptive treatment of poetic rhythm, the first full treatment of the Latin hexameter in the history of philology, and a discussion of style and method in history writing. This is a new critical edition of the Actius and the first translation into English.

John Christopoulos provides a comprehensive account of abortion in early modern Italy. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives, he explores the meanings of a practice that was officially banned yet widely practiced and generally tolerated, demonstrating that Italy was hardly a haven for Catholic anti-abortion absolutism.

In 1499, Milan was an independent state with a stable government. But over the next thirty years, it descended into chaos amid the Italian Wars. John Gagné details Milan’s social and political breakdown. The Renaissance may have been the cradle of the modern nation-state, but it was also a time when sophisticated sovereigns collapsed.

Lorenz Böninger tells the story of Niccolò di Lorenzo della Magna, a major printer of Renaissance Italy. Niccolò’s hitherto mysterious life and career provide unparalleled insight into the business of printing in its earliest years, illuminating the economic, legal, and intellectual forces that surrounded the publication and dissemination of texts.

The Renaissance was also the beginning of the Age of Empires, yet the Grand Duchy of Tuscany failed to secure overseas colonies. How did Tuscany retain its place in European affairs and intellectual life? Brian Brege explores the shrewd diplomatic moves and domestic investments that safeguarded the duchy’s wealth and influence amid globalization.

Guido Ruggiero brings readers back to Renaissance Florence, capturing how the Decameron sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece of love, sex, loyalty, and betrayal resonated amid the Black Death and the era’s convulsive political change, reimagining truth and virtue in a moment both desperate and full of potential.

Founded in 1540, the Society of Jesus was instantly popular, attracting thousands of candidates in its first century. Camilla Russell looks to the lives and writings of early Jesuits to better understand the Society’s appeal, how it worked, and the ideas that drove Christian thinkers and missionaries during the Renaissance and early modern period.

Persian Manuscripts & Paintings from the Berenson Collection presents an in-depth analysis of the little-known Persian manuscripts and paintings collected by the world-renowned art historian, art critic, and connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Fourteen essays focus on three manuscripts and four detached folios.

The Oration by philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), to which later editors added the subtitle On the Dignity of Man, is the most famous text written in Italy at the height of the Renaissance. The Life of Giovanni by Gianfrancesco Pico, his nephew, is the only contemporary account of the philosopher’s brief and astonishing career.

This volume examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European critique: a reshaping of a nineteenth-century present that is perceived as deeply problematic. These essays recover the multidimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of, and commentary on the connections between the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century modernity.

When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World examines the encounter between European and American conceptions of sacrifice expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images.

Musicians have always been migratory frontrunners, and musical encounters have always generated nodes of cultural complexity. Seachanges brings together original essays that complicate Mediterranean and Atlantic histories and foreground music in mobility studies, from Turkish songs in France to Indigenous musicians in Latin America, and more.

Ariosto and the Arabs sheds new light on Ludovico Ariosto’s famous poem Orlando Furioso. The sixteen essays assembled here, produced by diverse scholars who work on Europe, Africa, and Asia, encompass several intertwined areas of analysis—philology, religious and social history, cartography, material and figurative arts, and performance.

A longstanding tradition holds that universities in early modern Italy suffered from cultural sclerosis and long-term decline. Drawing on rich archival sources, including teaching records, David Lines shows that one of Italy’s leading institutions, the University of Bologna, displayed remarkable vitality in the arts and medicine.

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance as well as a leading statesman. Eclogues and Garden of the Hesperides, both broadly inspired by Virgil, might be considered Pontano’s love songs to the landscapes of Naples. This volume features the first published translations of both works into English.

Paolo Giovio’s Portraits of Learned Men provides brief biographies of 146 men from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives that were meant to accompany portraits in a museum of great figures in modern history. This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin text and a new, more complete English translation.

The Mongol Empire in Global History and Art History includes essays on topics from historical chronicles to contemporary historiography, and case studies from textile production to map-making and historical linguistics. Contributors include specialists of Mongol history and historiography as well as Islamic, East Asian, and European art.

Muir explores an era of cultural innovation that promoted free inquiry in the face of philosophical and theological orthodoxy, advocated libertine morals, critiqued the tyranny of aristocratic fathers over their daughters, and expanded the theatrical potential of grand opera. In so doing, he reveals the distinguished past of today’s culture wars.

Dale Kent explores the meaning of love and friendship as they were represented in the fifteenth century, particularly the relationship between heavenly and human friendship.

Why do the paintings and poetry of the Italian Renaissance—a celebration of classical antiquity—also depict the Florentine countryside populated with figures dressed in contemporary silk robes and fleur-de-lys crowns? Charles Dempsey argues that a fusion of classical form with contemporary content was the defining characteristic of the period.

This probing analysis of three of Giotto’s major works and the patrons who commissioned them goes beyond the clichés of Giotto as the founding figure of western painting. It traces the interactions between Franciscan friars and powerful bankers and illuminates the complex interactions between mercantile wealth and the iconography of poverty.

The Renaissance was a rebirth of art and literature—and of machines. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Paolo Galluzzi guides readers through a singularly inventive period featuring Taccola’s and da Vinci’s fusion of artistry and engineering and new concepts of learning that enabled Galileo’s revolutionary mathematical science of mechanics.

The sense of reading as an intimate act of self-discovery—and of communion between authors and book lovers—has a long history. Lina Bolzoni returns to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso, exploring how Renaissance humanists began to represent reading as a private encounter and a dialogue across barriers of time and space.

Leon Battista Alberti was among the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. Biographical and Autobiographical Writings includes On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, The Life of St. Potitus, My Dog, My Life, and The Fly. It presents the first collected English translations of these works and an authoritative Latin text.

Although Robert Klein (1918–1967), well known for his erudition and the originality of his research, was an important, even paradigmatic figure for the field of art history in the twentieth century, no sustained study has yet been dedicated to his work. Robert Klein: A Meteor in Art History and Philosophy sheds light on his intellectual journey.