The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance

Christopher Celenza is Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University, Washington DC, where he has a joint appointment in History and Classics. He the author of several books including the prize-winning The Lost Italian Renaissance (2005) and Machiavelli: A Portrait (2015). His work has been featured in Salon, The Huffington Post, and on radio and television. Former Director of the American Academy in Rome, he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harvard University Center for the Study of the Italian Renaissance (Villa I Tatti), the American Academy in Rome, and the Fulbright Foundation.

• 1. Beginnings; 2. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio; 3. The Italian Renaissance takes root in Florence; 4. Florentine humanism, translation, and a new (old) philosophy; 5. Dialogues, institutions, and social exchange; 6. Who owns culture? Classicism, institutions, and the vernacular; 7. Poggio Bracciolini; 8. Lorenzo Valla; 9. The nature of the Latin language: Poggio versus Valla; 10. Valla, Latin, Christianity, culture; 11. A changing environment; 12. Florence: Marsilio Ficino, I; 13. Ficino, II; 14. The voices of culture in late fifteenth-century Florence; 15. 'We barely have time to breathe'. Poliziano, Pico, Ficino, and the beginning of the end of the Florentine Renaissance; 16. Angelo Poliziano's Lamia in context; 17. Endings and new beginnings: the language debate.

'In The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance, Christopher Celenza provides a priceless vademecum for the study of Italian humanism. It rolls up in a delectable ball all that has come before: Garin and Kristeller; Burckhardt, Baron, and Martines; Fubini and Vasoli; Hankins, Allen, and the others. It presents in depth and with exquisite clarity the major works of nine leading humanists from Petrarch to Poliziano (plus many others introduced in discursive 'parentheses'), culminating with the writer and critic Pietro Bembo, who translates the humanist heritage into a new language of art, a Latinized Tuscan. The lucidity of the explication de textes is matched by the precision with which Celenza profiles his cast of characters, who are presented with full dimensionality in their psychological, social, and cultural contexts: the careerist Poggio, the brawler Valla, the self-made man and Medici servitor Poliziano.' Margaret L. King, The Catholic Historical Review