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New Titles

Leon Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome (Descriptio Vrbis Romæ)
Edited by Mario Carpo (Ecole d'Architecture de Paris-La Villette) and Francesco Furlan (Universite de Paris VIII);
Critical edition by Jean-Yves Boriaud (Universite de Nantes) and Francesco Furlan;
English translation by Peter Hicks (University of Bath)

In the 1440s, Leon Battista Alberti carried out a topographical survey of the city of Rome that, he claims, was conducted as accurately as possible using “mathematical tools” (ex mathematicis instrumentis). Around 1450 he published his findings in a small book, entitled Descriptio urbis Romæ, which describes a simple technical device, a drawing instrument composed of two graduated parts: a circle, which Alberti calls horizon, and its revolving spoke (called, appropriately, radius), that each reader of his book is expected to use to draw his or her own personal copy of Alberti’s original map of Rome.

Long neglected, this work of Alberti’s has been the subject of a recent critical revival. Its role in the history of cartography, mapping, surveying, and in the history of early modern antiquarian culture, has been thoroughly examined, but the mode of use of the work, and its original purpose, have for the most part gone unnoticed. This function of Alberti’s text—the encryption of a picture in a digital file transmitted with all instructions necessary to recreate a new picture proportionally identical to the archetype but in the absence of the original drawing—was first suggested by Mario Carpo in an essay published in the journal Albertiana in 1998. This thesis was further developed in other essays by Carpo and by Francesco Furlan, and it is now largely accepted by Albertian specialists and scholars in related fields.

The Société Internationale Leon Battista Alberti and ACMRS have joined forces to publish the first critical edition of Alberti’s Latin text based on all known manuscripts, a philological study of its manuscript tradition and of its tradition in print, its first English translation, and two essays that assess and contextualize the relation of text and images. As will be shown, Alberti’s apparently untimely experimentation with digital technologies should be seen in the light of Alberti’s critical approach to the production and transmission of hand-made drawings—a crucial node of his work as a theoretician as well as a practitioner in several visual arts. In turn, this issue pertains to a larger and more general field of enquiry: the history of the use of variable media for the transmission of reliable visual information before the rise of printed images.
2007 / 124 + viii pages / ISBN: 978-0-86698-383-9 / MR 335 / $38, £27

Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice
Edited and Translated by Joseph F. O’Connor and Christine Smith
This book examines how Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459), by interpreting the great architectural projects of his day within historical, literary, and spiritual contexts, articulated their relevance for his contemporaries as cultural paradigms of the Early Italian Renaissance. Manetti, wealthy, learned, devout, and politically active, was perhaps the most admired lay thinker of his generation, a leader within the new intellectual currents of his native Florence and prominent in Rome at the court of Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455). Manetti’s detailed accounts both of the consecration of Florence Cathedral in 1436 (“De secularibus et pontificalibus pompis” [“Concerning the Secular and Pontifical Parades”]) and of the ambitious building projects planned by Nicholas for a revival of papal splendor in Rome (book 2 of his “Life of Nicholas V Supreme Pontiff”) are among the most elaborate architectural ekphrases of the fifteenth century. In these, he surpasses his better known rival, Leon Battista Alberti. These important Latin texts are presented here in new critical editions, with English translations and commentaries, preceded by chapters situating them within Manetti’s other writings, his vast reading, and his historical moment. A close reading of the texts, coupled with an in depth examination of the sites described and the ceremonies conducted there, shows how Manetti’s distinctive fusion of scholastic and Humanist ideas became authoritative for an Early Renaissance understanding of the cultural and spiritual power of buildings.
2007 / xviii, 508 pages / ISBN: 978-0-86698-362-4 / MR 317 / $69, £48

This is a copublication with Brepols Publishers (ASMAR vol. 20).
and can be purchased in North America through Cornell University Press Services
and outside of North America through Brepols.

Natale Conti's Mythologiae

Translated and Annotated by John Mulryan and Steven Brown
Natale Conti's Mythologiae is the first complete, fully annotated English translation of the most important mythography published during the Renaissance. Conti's huge work (over one thousand pages in the original texts) appeared in twenty-seven editions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was the most popular handbook of myth for the entire period. Conti provides a comprehensive coverage of the vast range of Greek and Roman myth, and subjects each myth to a tripartite analysis of its historical, "scientific", and ethical foundations. Translated into idiomatic english from the Frankfurt 1581 edition, the text is immediately accessible to scholars, students, and the general public.
2006 / xlvi, 978 pages / ISBN: 978-0-86698-361-7 / MR 316 / $110, £89

Vainglorious Death: A Funerary Fracas in Renaissance Brescia
Edited and translated by J. Donald Cullington and Stephen Bowd
In 1505 the Italian city of Brescia was divided by a dispute about costly funerals, greed and ambition. These themes are explored in two pamphlets written by prominent humanists involved in that dispute and presented here for the first time. This translation has been undertaken by a trained classical scholar and experienced translator of Renaissance texts in consultation with a historian of Renaissance Italy. Vainglorious Death offers students and academics interested in early modern Europe a fascinating insight into aspects of life in a Renaissance city such as sumptuary legislation, Christian humanism, gift relations, solidarity between the living and the dead, and civic puritanism.
2006 / lxx + 232 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-355-4, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-355-6 / MR 310 / $48, £36

Staging the Pastoral: Torquato Tasso's Aminta and the Emergence of Modern Western Theater
Maria Galli Stampino (University of Miami)
This monograph offers a micro-reconstruction of two performances of Tasso's seminar pastoral Aminta that took place in 1574 and 1628. Based on archival sources, this study offers an in-depth analysis of the occasion, circumstances, audiences, and reactions to these performances. It delineates processes of meaning-formation before, during, and after these events and underscores those elements of modern Western theater that were then coming into existence. Of interest to students and scholars of theater and performance, of early modern cultural history, of Italian literature, of comparative literature.
2005 / 310 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-323-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-323-5 / MR 280 / $46, £37

Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (1612)
Edited by Sally J. Cornelison (University of Kansas) and Scott B. Montgomery (University of Denver), with an Afterword by Joanna Cannon
The eleven essays in this volume explore the relationship between visual culture and traditions, public ritual, and individual and monastic devotion as they pertain to the cults of relics and holy images, as well as reliquaries and talismanic objects in Italy from c. 1100 to 1500. Through diverse methodological approaches, these studies examine a variety of contexts and forms of images and relics, and address issues such as audience response and the sacred performance of images.
2005 / 284 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-340-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-340-2 / MR 296 / $45, £37

Early Renaissance Invective and the Controversies of Antonio da Rho
Edited, translated, and annotated by David Rutherford (Central Michigan University)
The Milanese Franciscan Antonio da Rho (1395-1447) has mostly left his mark as a humanist, even though he received the traditional Franciscan theological training and consistently styled himself a theologian. Rho found classical invective to be his best defense in his controversies and was among the first of the humanists to use it extensively in his Apology against a certain Archdeacon (1427/28) and his Philippic against Antonio Panormita (1431/32). In his Philippic he defended himself against Antonio Panormita, the author of the Hermaphrodite, who began composing invective poetry that ridiculed Rho with obscene insults. This controversy with Panormita also involved Rho with the broader issue of the utility of the poets and poetry that frequently engaged the early humanists. In his attempt to discredit and vilify Panormita personally and professionally, Rho resorted to any piece of gossip. He exploited allegations about sexual taboos, played to Lombard xenophobia, and even denounced Panormita as a heretic. In reading these texts, the reader has to grapple with things that are profoundly complex. Rho compounds the complexity through the use of the genre of rhetorical invective and by his recourse to its standard themes and topics.
2005 / 359 pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-345-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-345-7 / MR 301 / $48, £37

This is Volume 19 in the Renaissance Text Series of the Renaissance Society of America. Visit the RTS web page for a complete list of titles.

Phaethon's Children: The Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara
Edited by Dennis Looney (University of Pittsburgh) and Deanna Shemek (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara brings together essays that range across numerous disciplines to examine Ferrarese cultural production from approximately 1400 to 1598. Over these two centuries, the Estense city developed cultural practices, visual arts, music, and literature that bear a distinct Ferrarese imprint. This volume explores the range of materials that beckons researchers to Ferrara in the fields of literary studies, history, the history of visual arts and culture, musicology, anthropology, women’s studies, ethnic and religious studies, theater and performance history, and other specializations, materials that have played a primary role in the cultural and political history of Italy as well as Ferrara.

2005 / 356 pages / 86698-329-5 / MR 286 / $50, £38

Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447 - 1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents
Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Universiteit van Amsterdam) and Ruud M. Bouthoorn (Independent Neolatin Specialist and Translator)

This is the first complete edition and translation in any modern language of the Hermetic writings of Lodovico Lazzarelli, an Italian poet and mystical philosopher from the late 15th century. Lazzarelli’s seminal importance for the history of Renaissance Hermetism was recognized by Paul Oskar Kristeller as early as 1938. While Marsilio Ficino had famously translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin, it was Lazzarelli who had first translated its final three tracts, that had been absent from the manuscript used by Ficino. Furthermore, with his Crater Hermetis Lazzarelli had produced a jewel of Christian Hermetic literature, which still remains one of the purest and most impressive examples of the genre, in addition to being one of the very earliest testimonies of Christian kabbalah as well. In recognition of these facts, Lazzarelli was given a central role in the first scholarly collection of Renaissance Hermetic texts, published by Eugenio Garin and others in 1955. However, in the wake of Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), which brought the Hermetic Tradition to the attention of a large international audience, Lazzarelli was marginalized and forgotten. Only since the mid-1980s, Italian scholars like Claudio Moreschini and Maria Paola Saci have began once more to call attention to the poet from San Severino, but again their influence has remained restricted to the circles of Italian specialists.

2005 / 356 pages / 86698-324-4 / MR 281 / $45, £34

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Urania: The Story of a Young Woman's Love & The Novella of Giulia Camposanpiero and Thesibaldo Vitaliani by Giulia Bigolina
Edited and translated by Christopher Nissen (University of California at Berkeley)

Giulia Bigolina has been nearly forgotten by modern literary scholars. She was a married woman of the minor nobility who lived in Padua, in Venetian territory, ca. 1516-1569. Although none of her works were published during her lifetime, she did gain considerable local renown as a writer of novellas and other works of prose fiction dealing with love, a literary field to which Italian women of the early modern period almost never contributed because of the risk of public scandal.

This critical edition brings together the Italian texts of both of Bigolina's known surviving works, "Urania: The Story of a Young Woman's Love" and her "Novella of Giulia Camposanpiero and Thesibaldo Vitaliani," providing as well English translations in facing-page format. The notes and extensive introduction contain the fruits of Christopher Nissen's many years of original research on this author in the libraries of Italy and France. The notes to this edition include descriptions of all of Bigolina's surviving manuscripts, along with details of their textual characteristics and problems of interpretation. All of Bigolina's historical and mythological references are also explained in the notes. This edition aims to make the complete surviving works of this little-known but highly significant author available to a wide audience of scholars for the first time, both in English and the original Italian.

2004 / 334 pages / 86698-305-8 / MR 262 / $45, £36

The Journal of Aurelio Scetti: A Florentine Galley Slave at Lepanto (1565-1577)
Translated and edited by Luigi Monga (Vanderbilt University)

On 9 August 1565, on the main square of Arezzo, Aurelio Scetti, a Florentine musician, was about to be beheaded for the murder of his wife. At the last minute, thanks to the intervention of some of Scetti's powerful acquaintances at the court of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici in Florence, his death sentence was commuted, and Aurelio was sentenced to life in the galleys and assigned to the captain of the Pisana. Barely more than a two-masted rowing boat, the Pisana was one of four galleys of the fleet of the Holy Military Order of Saint Stephen, which the duke had created in 1561 to fight the Barbary pirates who were pillaging the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The powers of southern Europe were in the midst of a giant struggle between the great maritime cities of Italy and the Turkish power. Helped by independent Moorish corsairs, whose home bases were in ports of northern Africa, Istanbul pursued a war of attrition and pillage on the coastal areas of Italy and Spain until most of the Catholic states joined together to fight the Islamic enemy at Lepanto, on 7 October 1571.

This is the world described in Aurelio Scetti's manuscript, a chronicle of eleven years of captivity. He sent it to the duke of Florence, with a petition asking to be freed. We do not know whether he was finally released or died in jail; the archives are silent on this point. This text is an exciting account of life on a galley, full of details about naval battles with the Islamic fleet and internal fights among Christian admirals, enhanced by Scetti's own pen-and-ink drawings of galleys, harbors, and storms.

2004 / 192 pages / 86698-309-0 / MR 266 / $30, £24

Renaissance Fables: Aesopic Prose by Leon Battista Alberti, Bartolomeo Scala, Leonardo Da Vinci, Bernardino Baldi
Translated with an introduction and notes by David Marsh (Rutgers University)

An important genre of Renaissance literature was the philosophical Aesopic fable, a tradition initiated by Leon Battista Alberti, whose Apologi centum, a pithy collection written in just nine days (16-24 December 1437), spawned numerous imitations. Alberti’s model was imitated in the Latin “centuries” of Bartolomeo Scala’s Apologi centum (1481) and Apologorum liber secundus (1488-92), and of Lorenzo Astemio’s two Hecatomythia (1495, 1505). Alberti also inspired apologues written in Italian prose: Leonardo da Vinci’s scattered favole (ca. 1485-95) and Bernardino Baldi’s 1582 Cento apologhi (first published in 1590).

Based on recent critical editions, Renaissance Fables offers the first English versions of fables by Alberti, Scala, and Baldi, as well as a new translation of Leonardo’s fables. While the fables themselves are often epigrammatically short, they engage large issues of human society and morality by means of symbols and situations borrowed from the world of nature. Extensive textual notes identify the authors’ literary and scientific sources and provide cross-references that aid in our understanding of these often enigmatic works. Readers with an interest in Renaissance allegory, emblems, and philosophy, or in artists like Alberti and Leonardo, will find fascinating connections with their own disciplines.

2004 / 376 pages / 86698-303-1 / MR 260 / $35, £30

Brunetto Latini: Li livres dou tresor
Edition and Study by Spurgeon Baldwin (University of Alabama, Emeritus) and Paul Barrette (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220-1294) was a prominant figure in Florentine politics, perhaps most widely known because of Dante's reference to him in Canto XV of the Inferno. His Livre dou Tresor is a compilation of material previously available to the learned in Latin texts, presented here in a vernacular language as a kind of De Regimine principum not for the nobility, but for those responsible for city government in the political circumstances prevalent in Italy, and more specifically Florence, at the time.

Written in French during his exile in France (1260-1266), and possibly dedicated to Charles of Anjou himself, the work enjoyed wide popularity during the next two centuries, as attested by the numerous medieval manuscripts: approximately 80 in French, perhaps as many as 40 Italian translations, and some 17 in various Iberian languages, including Castilian, Catalan, and Aragonese.

This edition is based on the Escorial manuscript, an early (late thirteenth century) version in French, reflecting certain features of the language of the north, and especially of Picardy, where Brunetto spent most of his exile years. The Escorial manuscript appears to be unique among early manuscripts in French in that it contains much material missing from the other manuscripts in French; of special interest is a long passage in the Bestiary, which is missing from all other French versions.

2003 / 392 pages / 86698-300-7 / MR 257 / $38, £34

Pietro Alighieri, Comentum super poema Comedie Dantis: A Critical Edition of the Third and Final Draft of Pietro Alighieri's Commentary on Dante's The Divine Comedy
Edited by Massimiliano Chiamenti (New York University)
This is the first edition of the third and final version of Pietro Alighieri's commentary on his father's Divine Comedy. It is precisely the third version that contains a wealth of material not present in the earlier two versions and demonstrates the evolution of Pietro's thought and interpretative skills over a period of some twenty-five years. The reader is able to see how Dante's great poem was interpreted by a learned audience in the first generations of its circulation, and this allows for a greater insight into the meaning of the poem both then and now.

The edited text, complete and transcribed directly from the extant manuscripts, is accompanied by a critical apparatus and by an introduction that gives full account of the manuscript transmission, the language and genre of the text and its dating, the relationships among the three different drafts, and the cultural background of Pietro Alighieri, who was active in Verona as a judge, poet, and scholar around 1335-1365.

The work as a whole makes a contribution to a number of fields: Dante studies, medieval Latin/Italian literature, commentary tradition, the reception of classical texts in the Middle Ages, as well as medieval studies in general. Although the book is suited for a specialized audience of medievalists, the introduction can be read by any student of the humanities as its scope is not limited to Dante but rather aims at defining the status and character of the "commentary," be it biblical, juridical, or other.
2003/ 722 pages / 86698-289-2 / MR 247 / $58, £52

Isabella Andreini, La Mirtilla: A Pastoral
translated with an introduction and notes by Julie Campbell (Eastern Illinois University)
This comic masterpiece is the first known pastoral play written by a woman, the accomplished and erudite Isabella Andreini (1562-1604), poet, playwright, member of the academy of Pavia, and co-director of the famous Gelosi company with her husband, Francesco Andreini. She imitates the conceits of Tasso's Aminta and writes in response to the texts of her male counterparts on subjects such as mythology, Platonic philosophy, literary theory, and questioni d'amore. The text, available for the first time in English, will interest students of Renaissance drama and women's studies.
2002 / 136 pages / 86698-284-1 / MR242 $26, £23

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Raffaele Brandolini, On Music and Poetry (De Musica et poetica, 1513)
translated by Ann E. Moyer (University of Pennsylvania), with the assistance of Marc Laureys
The late Paul Kristeller recognized the need for a translation of Brandolini's important treatise. Transcribed here from the Latin and translated into English for the first time, this facing-page edition comprises the first humanistic treatment of music as an intellectual and performative discipline. It offers an extended look at the intersection of Roman humanist culture and leisure at the Vatican courts of Julius II and Leo X. Brandolini's circle of Roman humanists is now seen as a major element of Renaissance humanist culture. This edition will especially interest musicologists for its treatment of extemporaneous performance practices and also students of the humanist movement on subjects such as rhetoric and poetics, religion and ancient theology, and the powers of music.
2001 / 160 pages / 86698-274-4 / MR232 / $34, £31

Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation
Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark
Immensely popular for over 150 years, De vita, the first treatise on the health of the intellectual, is central to any attempt to understand Ficino.