The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance

Cambridge Companions to Culture

by Michael Wyatt (Editor)

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Italy

472 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2014

About the author

Having studied philosophy and theology at the Università Gregoriana (Rome), he received his PhD in Italian Studies at Stanford University in 2000. He has previously taught at Gonzaga College High School (Washington, DC), Northwestern University, Wesleyan University, the Università degli Studi di Trento, and Stanford University, where he was also the founding Associate Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS). He has been the recipient of fellowships at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, I Tatti–The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His work is primarily engaged with the premodern cultural and intellectual history of Italy, focused within a European and Mediterranean matrix and dealing particularly with issues related to translation as both textual and sociopolitical practice. He has lectured extensively in the United States, Italy, England, France, Spain, and Australasia. Two current book projects are John Florio and the Circulation of 'Stranger' Cultures in Stuart Britain, and Dido's Legacy: Oblivion and Promise in Italy's Past Present.

Reviews

[Daniel Rothwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most articles are very broad - necessitated by the scale of course - but all are very excellent *surveys* of their topics.

[Daniel Schotman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always with any CC. Very informative and filled with ample of articles of high quality. A very welcoming addition to the series.

[Barbara Phillips-Farley · Rating 3 out of 5]

a bit more esoteric than I'd like, but quite interesting