In Sperone Speroni and the Debate over Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance Teodoro Katinis mines a number of little or unstudied primary sources and offers the first book on the rebirth of ancient sophists in the Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Leonardo Bruni to Jacopo Mazzoni, with a focus on the Italian writer and philosopher Sperone Speroni (1500-1588). Katinis convincingly argues that Speroni is a unique case of an early modern thinker who explicitly rejected Plato’s demonization and defended the public role of the sophistic rhetoric, which enhanced the debate over the sophistic arts and scepticism in a variety of fields and anticipated some of the most revolutionary modern thoughts.

Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study. The reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle's Poetics was a crucial part of the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. Revisiting the translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises produced, the contributors apply new interdisciplinary methods from book history, translation studies, history of the emotions and classical reception to them. Placing several early modern Italian poetic texts in dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory for the first time, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond models contemporary practice and maps out avenues for future study.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

Leonora Bernardi (1559-1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first ever study of Bernardi’s life, and modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscript. Her writings appear in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, critical essays and contributions by Eric Nicholson, Eugenio Refini and Davide Daolmi. Based on new archival research, the substantial opening section reconstructs Bernardi’s unusually colourful life. Bernardi’s works reveal her connections with some of the most pioneering poets, dramatists and musicians of the day, including her mentor Angelo Grillo and the first opera librettist Ottavio Rinuccini. The second major section presents her pastoral tragicomedy Clorilli, one of the earliest secular dramatic works by a woman. It was apparently performed in the early 1590s at a Medici villa near Florence, before Grandduke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, and his consort Christine of Lorraine, but now exists in an enigmatic Venetian manuscript. The third section presents Bernardi’s secular and religious verse, which engaged with new trends in lyric and poetry for music, and was set by various key composers across Italy.

This book reveals a tradition of thought overlooked in our intellectual history but enormously influential even now: the tradition of odious praise. Distinct from more conventional rhetorical exercises, such as panegyric or the funeral oration, odious praise uses acclaim to censure or to critique. This book reassesses the genre of praise-and-blame rhetoric by considering the potential of odious praise to undermine consensus and to challenge a society’s normative values. Surveying literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Europe, Eric MacPhail identifies a tradition of epideictic rhetoric that began with the sophists but was cultivated and employed most vigorously by Renaissance political thinkers. Presenting examples from the writings of Lorenzo Valla, Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean Bodin, among others, MacPhail shows that by inscribing a positive value to an object worthy of blame, cultural values are turned on their head. MacPhail traces the use of this technique to critique the values of the classical and scholastic traditions. Recognizing and engaging with this tradition, MacPhail argues, can reinvigorate our study of the history of social thought and reveal further the roots of modern social science. Rigorous and lucid, Odious Praise presents a rhetoric capable of suspending and thus critiquing the values of a culture, and in doing so, it uncovers the first serious attempts at social thought and the seedbed of modern social science. It will be welcomed by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture, the history of rhetoric, and political thought.

The Classical Greek sophists – Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, and Antiphon, among others – are some of the most important figures in the flourishing of linguistic, historical, and philosophical reflection at the time of Socrates. They are also some of the most controversial: what makes the sophists distinctive, and what they contributed to fifth-century intellectual culture, has been hotly debated since the time of Plato. They have often been derided as reactionaries, relativists or cynically superficial thinkers, or as mere opportunists, making money from wealthy democrats eager for public repute. This volume takes a fresh perspective on the sophists – who really counted as one; how distinctive they were; and what kind of sense later thinkers made of them. In three sections, contributors address the sophists' predecessors and historical and professional context; their major intellectual themes, including language, ethics, society, and religion; and their reception from the fourth century BCE to modernity.