Italian Literary Criticism and the Writing of Intellectual History
- Italian Literary Criticism and the Writing of Intellectual History*
Professor of English, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto; co-editor of Chaucer Criticism, I and II (1960 I and II (1961), editor of Delehaye, Legends of the Saints (1961) and of the forthcoming Yale edition of More’s Debellation, and general editor of the forthcomin Yale edition of More’s Confutation of Tyndale
Footnotes
* Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). 1961. Pp. xvi, 1184. $20.00.
notes
1. Thus Baxter Hathaway in his The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, 1962), vi. One may cite J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence (London, 1947), as an example of the shortcoming Hathaway points to, and one should acknowledge the great service of Allan H. Gilbert in providing generous translations from the Renaissance Italians in his Literary Criticism, Plato to Dryden (1940).
2. But I speak of Hathaway’s approach only to indicate it as one of the several possible approaches; there is no attempt to evaluate his study or to compare it with Weinberg’s.
3. And he continues: “There is no need to try to identify Italian literary theorizing exclusively with Padua, but of the writers with whom we shall be concerned Tomitano, Speroni, Fracastoro, Varchi, Robortclli, Luisino, Barbaro, Castelvetro, Patrizi, Mazzoni, Guastavini, Pescetti, and Tasso all had strong connections with the University of Padua, and this is a large percentage of the total” (306).
4. On dramatic activities see E. H. Wilkins, A History of Italian Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 242: “The country around Padua was one of the chief centers of popular and semi-popular dramatic activity”; see further K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1934)—but Weinberg has not attempted to relate dramatic theorizing to contemporary dramatic life.
On the general contribution of Padua to Renaissance thought and letters see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome, 1956), passim; and on Paduan Aristotelianism see also JHI, I (1940), 131–206, and 177–206, and B. Nardi, Saggi sull’ aristotelismo padovano (1958).
5. I have discussed some aspects of the Ramistic impact in an extended analysis of Ong’s impressive research on Ramus: see New Scholasticism, XXXIV (1960), 537–45.
