Reappraisal of the pioneering humanist scholar Biondo Flavio During his lifetime the historian and antiquarian Biondo Flavio (1392– 1463) struggled to obtain recognition as a major contributor to the humanistic movement of the fifteenth century. Throughout the Renaissance, fellow Italian scholars far too often condemned rather than endorsed his scholarly works. His troublesome career and mixed reputation among his peers stand in stark contrast with the highly innovative character of his learning, which proved to be ground-breaking for the further development of various strands of historical and antiquarian research in the Early Modern Age. The authors of this volume aim to contribute to a reappraisal of this pioneering humanist scholar by a fresh assessment of his major writings in the fields of historical linguistics, historiography, Roman topography, and historical geography. Contributors Angelo Mazzocco (Mount Holyoke College), Marc Laureys (Universität Bonn), Giuseppe Marcellino (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), Fulvio Delle Donne (Università della Basilicata), Fabio Della Schiava (Universität Bonn), Paolo Pontari (Università di Pisa), Catherine Castner (University of South Carolina), Jeffrey White (St. Bonaventure University), Frances Muecke (University of Sydney)

The early modern world was profoundly bilingual: alongside the emerging vernaculars, Latin continued to be pervasively used well into the 18th century. Authors were often active in and conversant with both vernacular and Latin discourses. The language they chose for their writings depended on various factors, be they social, cultural, or merely aesthetic, and had an impact on how and by whom these texts were received. Due to the increasing interest in Neo-Latin studies, early modern bilingualism has recently been attracting attention. This volumes provides a series of case studies focusing on key aspects of early modern bilingualism, such as language choice, translations/rewritings, and the interferences between vernacular and Neo-Latin discourses. Contributors are Giacomo Comiati, Ronny Kaiser, Teodoro Katinis, Francesco Lucioli, Giuseppe Marcellino, Marianne Pade, Maxim Rigaux, Florian Schaffenrath, Claudia Schindler, Federica Signoriello, Thomas Velle, Alexander Winkler.

This book uncovers a long-lost classification mechanism for analysing the Deliberazioni, secretive records of the medieval Venetian Senate. Using Albanian cities as a case study, the book helps identify unspoken state priorities during a transformative decade for Venice.

While humanists agreed on identifying the main requirement of the historical genre with truthfulness, they disagreed on their notions of historical truth. Some authors equated historical truth with verisimilitude, thus harmonizing the quest for truth with other ingredients of their histories, such as their political utility and rhetorical aptness. Others, instead, rejected the notion of verisimilitude, identifying historical truth with factuality. Accordingly, they sought to produce bare and exhaustive accounts of all the things that pertained to their historical explorations, often resorting to innovative disciplines, such as archeology, philology, and the history of institutions. The humanist historiographical debate is especially significant because the notion of verisimilitude encompassed crucial elements required for the development of methods of critical assessment. By perceiving verisimilitude and factuality as irreconcilable, Quattrocento humanists reached a critical impasse—those who were interested in factual truth mostly lacked the means to ascertain it, while those that developed embryonic notions of historical criticism were not eminently concerned with the factual account of the past. This critical weakness exposed humanists to considerable risks, including that of accepting non-verisimilar historical forgeries passed off as factual. Such forgeries eventually served as a testing ground for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, who sought to restore factual truth by means of critical criteria grounded in verisimilitude, thus overcoming the humanist impasse. Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy addresses Renaissance history, philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence to shed light on how humanists conceptualized truth and, more specifically, historical truth.

Representing Rome's Emperors brings together an international team of experts to examine the literary and artistic representations of Roman emperors across more than two thousand years of history, breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries that have separated the study of emperors in antiquity from their representation in later periods.

Land Air Sea: Architecture and Environment in the Early Modern Era positions the long Renaissance and eighteenth century as being vital for understanding how many of the concerns present in contemporary debates on climate change and sustainability originated in earlier centuries. Traversing three physical and intellectual domains, Land Air Sea consists of case studies examining how questions of environmentalism were formulated in early modern architecture and the built environment. Addressing emergent technologies, indigenous cultural beliefs, natural philosophy, and political statecraft, this book aims to recast our modernist conceptions of what buildings are by uncovering early modern epistemologies that redefined human impact on the habitable world.

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?

This volume is devoted to the spheres in which conflict and rivalries unfolded during the Renaissance and how these social, cultural and geographical settings conditioned the polemics themselves. This is the second of three volumes on 'Renaissance Conflict and Rivalries', which together present the results of research pursued in an International Leverhulme Network. The underlying assumption of the essays in this volume is that conflict and rivalries took place in the public sphere that cannot be understood as single, all-inclusive and universally accessible, but needs rather to be seen as a conglomerate of segments of the public sphere, depending on the persons and the settings involved. The articles collected here address various questions concerning the construction of different segments of the public sphere in Renaissance conflict and rivalries, as well as the communication processes that went on in these spaces to initiate, control and resolve polemical exchanges.

In the renaissance also architecture from c. 800–1200 was regarded as a useful source of inspiration for contemporary building, sometimes by misinterpreting these medieval architecture as roman structures, sometimes because that era was also regarded as a glorious ‘ancient’ past.

This book offers a new view of Italian Renaissance intellectual life, linking philosophy and literature as expressed in both Latin and Italian.