Böcker i The I Tatti Renaissance Library-serien

Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) was the leading philologist of the first half of the fifteenth century, as well as a philosopher, theologian, and translator. His extant Latin letters, though few, afford a direct and unguarded window into the working life of the most passionate, difficult, and interesting of the Italian humanists.

In the Miscellanies, the great Italian Renaissance scholar-poet Angelo Poliziano penned two sets of mini-essays focused on lexical or textual problems. He solves these with his characteristic deep learning and brash criticism. The two volumes presented here are the first translation of both collection into any modern language.

Cyriac of Ancona is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. Cyriac's accounts of his travels, with commentary reflecting wide-ranging antiquarian, political, religious, and commercial interests, provide a fascinating record of the encounter of the Renaissance world with the legacy of classical antiquity.

Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure in the circle of Lorenzo de'Medici "il Magnifico" in Florence. His "Silvae" are poetical introductions to his courses in literature at the University of Florence, written in Latin hexameters.

Salutati's first surviving treatise was written for a lawyer who entered a Florentine monastery and requested a piece encouraging him to persevere in religious life. On the World and Religious Life is a wide-ranging reflection on humanity's misuse of God's creation and the need to orient human life with a proper hierarchy of values.

The most popular work of the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (1470-1555), On Discovery (De inventoribus rerum, 1499), was the first comprehensive account of discoveries and inventions written since antiquity. This is the first English translation of a critical edition based on the Latin texts published in Polydore Vergil's lifetime.

Scala (1430-1497) trained in the law and rose to prominence serving as secretary and treasurer to the Medicis and chancellor of the Guelf party before becoming first chancellor of Florence. This volume collects works from throughout his career that show the influence of fellow humanists such as Ficino, Pope Pius II, and Pico della Mirandola.

Michael Marullus (c. 1453/4-1500), born in Greece, began life as a mercenary soldier but became a prominent Neo-Latin poet and scholar in Italy. Later poets imitated him in vernacular love poetry, especially Ronsard. This edition contains Marullus' complete Latin poetry. All of these works appear in English translation for the first time.

Filelfo (1398-1481), one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance, was the principal humanist working in Lombardy in the middle of the Quattrocento and served as court poet to the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan. His Odes constitute the first complete cycle of Horatian odes since classical antiquity.

Sannazaro (1456-1530) is most famous for having written the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this work, he devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an adaption of the eclogue form.

Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance. His most substantial work of poetry was his Three Books on Xandra. Also included in this volume is the Carmina Varia, a collection whose centerpiece is a group of elegies directed to the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo.

The main literary dispute of the Renaissance pitted those Neo-Latin writers favoring Cicero alone as the apotheosis of Latin prose against those following an eclectic array of literary models. This Ciceronian controversy pervades the texts and letters collected for the first time in this volume.

Pontano was the most innovative, versatile Latin poet of Quattrocento Italy. His Two Books of Hendecasyllables, subtitled Baiae, are the elegant offspring of Pontano's leisure, written to celebrate love, good wine, friendship, nature, and all the pleasures of life to be found at the seaside resort of Baiae on the Bay of Naples.

Humanist Tragedies offers a sampling of Latin drama from the Tre- and Quattrocento. These five tragedies-Ecerinis, Achilleis, Progne, Hyempsal, and Fernandus servatus-were nourished by a potent amalgam of classical, medieval, and pre-humanist sources. Humanist tragedy testifies to momentous changes in literary conventions during the Renaissance.

A Socratic dialogue set in the court of King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary (ca. 1490), Republics and Kingdoms Compared depicts a debate between the king and a Florentine merchant at his court on the relative merits of republics and kingdoms. This is the first critical edition and the first translation into any language.

Francesco Petrarca, one of the greatest of Italian poets, was the leading spirit in the Renaissance movement to revive ancient Roman language and literature. Petrarch's four "Invectives", written in Latin, were inspired by the eloquence of the great Roman orator Cicero. This title includes the English translation of three of the four invectives.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. This volume contains Ficino's extended analysis and commentary on the Phaedrus.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a student of canon law who became a Catholic cardinal, was widely considered the most important original philosopher of the Renaissance. He wrote principally on theology, philosophy, and church politics. This volume makes most of Nicholas's other writings on Church and reform available in English for the first time.

Giovanni Pontano, best known today as a Latin poet, also composed popular prose dialogues and essays. The De sermone, translated into English here for the first time as The Virtues and Vices of Speech, provides a moral anatomy of aspects of speech such as truthfulness, deception, flattery, gossip, bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule.

Giovanni Pontano, the dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, wrote two brilliantly original poetical cycles. On Married Love is the first sustained exploration of married love in first-person poetry. Eridanus combines familiar motifs of courtly love with an allusive matrix of classical elegy and Pontano's distinctive vision.

Momus is the most ambitious literary creation of Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist-scientist-artist and "universal man" of the Italian Renaissance. In this dark comedy, written around 1450, Alberti charts the fortunes of his anti-hero Momus, god of criticism. This edition offers a new Latin text and the first full translation into English.

A medical authority, Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553) was also a prominent Neo-Latin poet. This volume includes his didactic poem Syphilis, which gave the name to the disease and contains the first poetical description of Columbus' discovery of America; a short Biblical epic, the Joseph; and the Carmina, a collection of shorter poetry.

Imprisoned for conspiring against Pope Paul II, Platina (1421-1481) returned to favor under Pope Sixtus IV, and composed this biographical compendium of the Roman popes, which became the standard reference on papal history for early modern Europe. This first complete translation into English is accompanied by an improved Latin text.

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), scholar and critic, was one of the most admired Latinists of his day. The poems in this volume come from all periods of his life and reflect both his erudition and his wide-ranging friendships. This volume also includes the prose dialogue Etna, an account of Bembo's ascent of Mt. Etna in Sicily during his student days.

Poliziano was one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance. This volume illuminates his close friendship with Pico della Mirandola and includes much of the correspondence about the composition and reception of his Miscellanies, a revolutionary work of philology. It also includes his famous letter on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici.

After the composition of the Decameron, and under the influence of Petrarch's humanism, Giovanni Boccaccio devoted the last decades of his life to compiling encyclopedic works in Latin. Among them is "Famous Women", the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted to women.

In On Human Worth and Excellence, celebrated diplomat, historian, philosopher, and scholar Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) asks: what are the moral, intellectual, and spiritual capabilities of the unique amalgam of body and soul that constitutes human nature? This I Tatti edition contains the first complete translation into English.

Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure in the Florence during the Age of the Medici. This I Tatti edition contains all of his Greek and Latin poetry (with the exception of the Silvae in ITRL 14) translated into English for the first time.

Biondo Flavio was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity and popularized the term Middle Age to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of antiquity in his own time. Rome in Triumph is the capstone of his research program, addressing the question: What made Rome great?

The Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is Valla's principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. Valla sought to replace the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic with a new logic based on the historical usage of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach.