Books in the The I Tatti Renaissance Library series

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.

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.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485-1566), humanist and bishop, came to prominence as a Latin poet in the Rome of Leo X and Clement VII. Leo commissioned this famous epic, a retelling of the life of Christ in the style of Vergil, which was published in 1535. This translation, accompanied by extensive notes, is based on a new edition of the Latin text.

Talks about Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), one of the most important theorist of the humanist movement. He wrote a major work on Latin style, "On Elegance in the Latin Language", which became a battle-standard in the struggle for the reform of Latin across Europe, and "Dialectical Disputations", a wide-ranging attack on scholastic logic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?