Books in the The I Tatti Renaissance Library series

Giannozzo Manetti's Apologeticus was a defense of the study of Hebrew and of the need for a new translation. It constituted the most extensive treatise on the art of translation of the Renaissance. This ITRL edition contains the first complete translation of the work into English.

Giovanni Pontano, the dominant literary figure of quattrocento Naples, wrote two brilliantly original poetical cycles. On Married Love is the first sustained exploration of married love in first-person poetry. Eridanus combines familiar motifs of courtly love with an allusive matrix of classical elegy and Pontano's distinctive vision.

The defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy League fleet at Lepanto (1571) was among the most celebrated international events of the sixteenth century. The Battle of Lepanto anthologizes the work of twenty-two poets who composed Latin poetry in response to the news of the battle, the largest Mediterranean naval encounter since antiquity.

Salutati's first surviving treatise was written for a lawyer who entered a Florentine monastery and requested a piece encouraging him to persevere in religious life. On the World and Religious Life is a wide-ranging reflection on humanity's misuse of God's creation and the need to orient human life with a proper hierarchy of values.

Manetti (1396-1459) was a leading humanist biographer of the Renaissance. This voulme brings together his biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which helped establish the canon of Italian literature, and his parallel lives of Socrates and Seneca-the standard biographical sources for those philosophers throughout the early modern period.

Momus is the most ambitious literary creation of Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist-scientist-artist and "universal man" of the Italian Renaissance. In this dark comedy, written around 1450, Alberti charts the fortunes of his anti-hero Momus, god of criticism. This edition offers a new Latin text and the first full translation into English.

The most popular work of the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (1470-1555), On Discovery (De inventoribus rerum, 1499), was the first comprehensive account of discoveries and inventions written since antiquity. This is the first English translation of a critical edition based on the Latin texts published in Polydore Vergil's lifetime.

Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) was the leading philologist of the first half of the fifteenth century, as well as a philosopher, theologian, and translator. His extant Latin letters, though few, afford a direct and unguarded window into the working life of the most passionate, difficult, and interesting of the Italian humanists.

Cyriac of Ancona is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. Cyriac's accounts of his travels, with commentary reflecting wide-ranging antiquarian, political, religious, and commercial interests, provide a fascinating record of the encounter of the Renaissance world with the legacy of classical antiquity.

Michael Marullus (c. 1453/4-1500), born in Greece, began life as a mercenary soldier but became a prominent Neo-Latin poet and scholar in Italy. Later poets imitated him in vernacular love poetry, especially Ronsard. This edition contains Marullus' complete Latin poetry. All of these works appear in English translation for the first time.

Francesco Filelfo's On Exile depicts noblemen and humanists, driven from Florence by Cosimo de' Medici, discussing the sufferings of exile-poverty and loss of reputation-and the best way to endure and profit from them. This volume contains the first complete edition of the Latin text and the first complete translation into any modern language.

Paolo Giovio's dialogue provides an informed perspective on the sack of Rome in 1527, from a friend of Pope Clement VII. The work discusses literary style and whether the vernacular could surpass Latin as a vehicle for literary expression. This volume includes a fresh edition of the Latin text and the first translation into English.

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.

Collected here, Vergerio's Paulus, Philodoxeos fabula by Alberti, Philogenia et Epiphebus by Pisani, Chrysis by Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), and Medio's Epirota span nearly the entire Quattrocento and are a valuable gauge of its changing literary tastes, tastes nourished by the ancient comic drama of Plautus and Terence.

In 1490/92 the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino made new translations of two treatises he believed were the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of St. Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. They are presented here in new critical editions accompanied by English translations, the first into any modern language.

Cyriac of Ancona (1391-1452) was among the first to study the physical remains of the ancient world in person and is sometimes regarded as the father of classical archaeology. This volume contains a life of Cyriac to the year 1435 by his friend Francesco Scalamonti, along with several letters and other texts illustrating his early life.

The letters of Bartolomeo Fonzio-a leading literary figure in Florence of the time of Lorenzo de' Medici and Machiavelli-are a window into the world of Renaissance humanism and classical scholarship. This first English translation includes the famous letter about the discovery on the Via Appia of the perfectly preserved body of a Roman girl.

Lilio Gregorio Giraldi authored many works on literary history, mythology, and antiquities. Among the most famous are his dialogues, modeled on Cicero's Brutus, translated here into English for the first time. The work gives a panoramic view of European poetry in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, concentrating above all on Italy.

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), scholar and critic, was one of the most admired Latinists of his day. The poems in this volume come from all periods of his life and reflect both his erudition and his wide-ranging friendships. This volume also includes the prose dialogue Etna, an account of Bembo's ascent of Mt. Etna in Sicily during his student days.

Edited here for the first time is Florentius de Faxolis' music treatise for Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. The richly illuminated small parchment codex bears witness to the musical interests of the cardinal, himself an avid singer. The author's unusual insights into the musical thinking of his day are discussed in the ample commentary.

The Hermaphrodite's open celebration of vice, particularly sodomy, earned it public burnings, threats of excommunication, banishment to the closed sections of libraries, and a devoted following. Beccadelli combined the comic realism of Italian popular verse with the language of Martial to explore the underside of the early Renaissance.

Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure in the circle of Lorenzo de'Medici "il Magnifico" in Florence. His "Silvae" are poetical introductions to his courses in literature at the University of Florence, written in Latin hexameters.

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.

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.

Sannazaro (1456-1530) is most famous for having written the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this work, he devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an adaption of the eclogue form.

Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance. His most substantial work of poetry was his Three Books on Xandra. Also included in this volume is the Carmina Varia, a collection whose centerpiece is a group of elegies directed to the Venetian humanist Bernardo Bembo.

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.

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.

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.