"I libri della famiglia has long been viewed by Italians as a classic of Italian literature. It displays a variety of styles--high rhetoric, systematic moral exposition, novelistic portrayal of character--in the typical Renaissance framework of the dialogue. The chief merit of the work lies in its scope: it directly assays the personal value system of the Florentine bourgeois class, which did so much to foster the development of art, literature, and science. This translation is based upon the critical edition by Cecil Grayson, Serena Professor of Italian Studies, Oxford."--Jacket.

The chief merit of this translation lies in its scope: It directly assays the personal value system of the Florentine bourgeois class, which did so much to foster the development of art, literature, & science.

A classic of Italian literature! The chief merit of this work lies in its scope: it directly assays the personal value system of the Florentine bourgeois class, which did so much to foster the development of art, literature, and science. It displays a variety of high styleshigh rhetoric, systematic moral exposition, novelistic portrayal of characterin the typical Renaissance framework of the dialogue. The treatise, in its entirety, shows a Florentine paterfamilias and two uncles instructing some submissive nephews in the ethics of private life. Money and reputation are its primary themes. Book III, the most dramatic, far-ranging, and down-to-earth of the four books, does not present a single bourgeois outlook but, as a dialogue, expresses conflicting points of view, enabling students to relive social and moral conflicts that troubled early capitalist society.

Alberti’s Della Pittura was the first modern analytical study of painting, a pioneering treatise on the theory of art. A systematic description of the one-point perspective construction, it was primarily designed to persuade both patron and painter in the Renaissance to discard the old tastes in painting for the new. John R. Spencer's translation of Della Pittura is based on all the known manuscripts and is edited with an Introduction and Notes.

Focusing on Florence, Thomas Kuehn demonstrates the formative influence of law on Italian society during the Renaissance, especially in the spheres of family and women. Kuehn's use of legal sources along with letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts allows him to present a compelling image of the social processes that affected the shape and function of the law. The numerous law courts of Italian city-states constantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces the permutations of these laws, then examines their use by Florentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate social behavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage, business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Ranging from one man's embittered denunciation of his father to another's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him as illegitimate, Law, Family, and Women provides fascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life in Renaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions, often articulated in and through the law, affected women. He examines the role of the mundualdus—a male legal guardian for women—in Florence, the control of fathers over their married daughters, and issues of inheritance by and through women. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda of Renaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value to both legal anthropologists and social historians. Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at Clemson University.

The Visual Poetics of Raymond Carver draws on the study of visual arts to illuminate the short stories of noted author Raymond Carver, in the broader context of vision and visualization in a literary text. Ayala Amir examines Carver's use of the eye-of-the-camera technique. Amir uncovers the tensions that structure his visual aesthetics and examines assumptions that govern scholarly discussions of his work, relating these matters to the complex nature of photography and to the current "visual turn"of cultural studies. The research uses visual approaches to reflect upon traditional issues of narrative study-duration, dialogue, narration, description, frame, character, and meaning. Amir shows how Carver's visual aesthetics shapes the meaning of his stories, while also challenging accepted notions of the boundaries of "the literary."