Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana | 2016 | N. 48

In Salutati’s private letters, verbal vehemence is related to a more general polemical dimension of writing, which aims at shaking the civic conscience of his contemporaries and underpinning a harsh criticism on political corruption. In spite of his polemical vein, Salutati shows a marked tendency to blame his disciples or friends for their use of verbal violence. By defending an art of verbal moderation, Salutati presents himself as an arbiter of speech and thus as the leading figure of the humanist movement. His prescriptions about the use or non-use of verbal violence are therefore an essential part of a strategy aiming at asserting intellectual supremacy over a network of intellectuals.

The Florentine scholar and diplomat, B.C. (1503-1562), left Florence in a voluntary exile in 1537, and settled at first in Ferrara, where the cardinal Ippolito d’Este asked him to compose a treatise of rhetoric. The work was completed only in the late 1550’s. Though it is to be considered as a summary of classical theory of discourse, la Retorica is strongly influenced by the historical moment and the florentine fuoriusciti culture : it aims to offer a practical manual of public speaking. This pragmatic approach turns out to approve verbal and intellectual violence, and develops a method of the perfect polemist, surpassing in this way the ancient rhetorical theory, whose purpose was mainly to control the emotional and intellectual violence.

The Dieci dialoghi della retorica (1562), together with the Dialoghi della historia (1560), belong to a larger project devoted by Patrizi to uses and misuses of language. In the paper I will focus in particular on the myth of the origins of mankind presented in the first dialogue on rhetoric. Offering a sort of anthropological explication of forms and aims of language, Patrizi considers there the human recourse to language as a rhetorical practice of abuse and violence due to the decadence of humankind.

Traditionally defined as a « conversation between separated friends », epistolary correspondence was in 16th century a highly codified genre which emerged as a privileged space for debate, personal attacks and verbal conflicts. This article aims at investigating the rhetorical procedures that convey intellectual violence within epistolary writing by focusing on the correspondance of two Florentine Republicans in exile, Donato Giannotti and Jacopo Corbinelli. It argues that the dispute risen in 1566-69 about the diffusion of Giannotti’s manuscript Della Republica fiorentina, reveals the existence of a generational conflict within antimedicean networks in exile and that intellectual violence was used as a founding act in order to sketch boundaries between competing and irreconcilable republican commitments.

The publication of Wallace K. Ferguson’s The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation in 1948 had a transformative effect on Renaissance scholarship worldwide. This article seeks to examine this effect in America, tracing the vicissitudes of the conjoined ideas of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism from the decades before the appearance of Ferguson’s book to recent times. It analyzes the fate of the competing interpretations of Renaissance humanism of Hans Baron, Eugenio Garin, and Paul Oskar Kristeller in the generations after Ferguson. Two appendices treat in turn Hans Baron as a Latin text editor and Anthony Molho’s attack on Kristeller.

This essay examines a core episode in Cellini’s Vita : his confinement in Castel Sant’Angelo (1538-1539), described in a long prose section followed by a capitolo in terza rima. In his narration, Benvenuto presents himself as a ‘martyr’ to Cosimo I, his addressee. This point is especially interesting if one thinks that, at the time he writes, he has recently finished another prison sentence in Florence : this fact leads him to establish a relationship between the two events. Through the close reading of the episode and of other related literary works (including a number of lyrics written by Cellini himself in the Florentine prison), I will try to determine the chronology of the capitolo that concludes the episode.

This paper is intended as a study of the divergent and convergent elements of the fantastic narration and cosmogonic myths, and it attempts to hybridize philosophical thought with a reflection upon literary genres. The theoretical issues formulated in the first part of the article are subsequently discussed making reference to Massimo Bontempelli’s mythopoeic magical realism and they provide the inspiration for the identification of three different types of stories on the origin in Bontempelli’s narrative production: the cosmogonic myths that can be considered true fables of knowledge; the fantastic tales with cosmogonic elements, in which the uncanny is reabsorbed in a peaceful acceptance of the mystery ; and the cosmogonic tales with fantastic elements, where, instead, the usual certainties of the myth vanish in the presence of the concerns hidden in the historical cycles.

The essay aims to verify and examine the various functions and meanings of the landscape in Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry. Particularly, the study focuses on the complex features of the physical and spiritual geography of the last collection, Conglomerati (2009), finally underlining the peculiar tension towards the ‘Place’ of Beauty.