The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities

Christopher S. Celenza is the James B. Knapp Dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Professor of History and Classics. Former Director of the American Academy in Rome, he is the author of the prize-winning The Lost Italian Renaissance (2004), Machiavelli: A Portrait (2015), and The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance (2017). His work has been featured in Salon, The Huffington Post, and on radio and television. Celenza has served as Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University and 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. Philology, the Italian renaissance, and authorship; 2. Lorenzo Valla, philology, emotion; 3. Losing your identity: Angelo Decembrio; 4. Trust and authenticity; 5. Pursuing a love of knowledge; 6. Shaping knowledge; 7. Forgetting philology: Rene Descartes; 8. Certainty. Skepticism; 9. Echoes.

'An engrossing story about how modernity was born when it learned to read and write the word. The parallels between the Italian Renaissance and our contemporary present are stunning. As before, so now: information glut and a rapidly evolving mediascape are challenges that only a new investment in critical sense-making – 'philology,' broadly understood – can meet. Celenza's call for a reinvigorated culture of the humanities today is both historically rich and prescient. His book is sure to bring a new dimension to the debates about the uses and reach of culture today.' James I. Porter, University of California, Berkeley