Confini dell'umanesimo letterario: Studi in onore di Francesco Tateo (review)

The work of Italian scholar Francesco Tateo touches upon an endless variety of topics, regions, and periods within the field of humanist studies, and in the spirit of his vast and eclectic work, Confini dell'umanesimo presents a collection of essays that provide a wide view of the field of Renaissance literary studies in Italy today. The collection is presented in three volumes containing eighty-two essays (almost all in Italian) that cover every imaginable topic within the field of Italian literary humanism. Like many compilations of essays written in homage to renowned scholars, Confini dell'umanesimo lacks a dominant focus. Therefore, while presenting relevant and insightful work on a variety of important issues, it does not project an overarching discursive framework. The essays are not arranged in any specific order or pattern, and the only semblance of a general purpose or unifying theme among the contributions is the notion, embraced by Francesco Tateo throughout his career, that the investigative effort of humanist research must be extended beyond its traditional boundaries in terms of topics, regions, and chronological framework. Confini dell'umanesimo spans thematically from a discussion on a little known fifteenth-century trionfo by Rogeri di Piacenza, in an essay by Mario Marti, to a general discussion on the expansion of the humanist movement from Florence to the rest of Europe in Mechel Feo's "Umanesimo italiano e umanesimo universale (da Firenze all'Europa)." In terms of a chronological framework, Confini dell'umanesimo really widens the scope of humanist scholarship; the collection spans from the Trecento, with several essays on Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, to the Novecento, with Arcangelo Leone de Castris's essay on Pirandello, and Mario Martelli's "Tardo umanesimo tra Otto e Novecento," an exposition on humanistic motifs and structure in the work of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian poets. Although the overwhelming majority of the essays in the collection focus on strictly literary subjects, some contributors venture into other fields. An example of this is Cesare Vasoli's "La critica del Patrizi alla dottrina aristotelica della esfera 'elementale' del fuoco." In this essay Vasoli presents an analytical outline of Patrizi's arguments against the Peripatetic claim that fire constitutes one of the four elemental spheres that provide the basic structure of the cosmos. Patrizi rejects Aristotle's contention based on his belief that the Peripatetic view was not based on either physical evidence or sound reasoning.

While some essays in the collection are quite specific in their focus (e.g., Emilio Pasquini's "Il canto della speranza," which provides a close textual analysis of Paradiso XXV), others seek to place their subject within a wider historical framework. Such is the case of Stella P. Revard's "Joannes Matthaeus Toscanus and the Limits of Italian Humanism," one of only two essays in English in the collection. In this study Revard explains how Toscanus's Carmina Illustrium Poetarum Italorum (an anthology of humanist poets writing in Latin) and the Peplus (an account of the most important men and women of Italy in the previous three hundred years) can be read as a measure of the boundaries of Latin literary humanism in Italy. Revard claims that Toscanus stands at a point in history (the mid 1550s) where he has enough perspective to define the evolution of a cultural movement that has almost run through all its developmental phases.

Several essays in the collection concentrate on the work of Giovanni Pontano. This is to be expected given Francesco Tateo's lifelong interest in the subject. One of the most interesting essays on Pontano is Davide Canfora's "Riflessioni di Giovanni Pontano su Cesare e Scipione." The rediscovery of the "republican" Scipio and the "dictatorial" or "monarchic" Julius Caesar during the Quattrocento gave rise to a debate on the superiority of one over the other. This debate became an instrument...