The Renaissance of Letters: Knowledge and Community in Italy, 1300–1650

✍ Scribed by Paula Findlen, Suzanne Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 357
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The Renaissance of Letters traces the multiplication of letter-writing practices between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Italian peninsula and beyond to explore the importance of letters as a crucial document for understanding the Italian Renaissance.

This edited collection contains case studies, ranging from the late medieval re-emergence of letter-writing to the mid-seventeenth century, that offer a comprehensive analysis of the different dimensions of late medieval and Renaissance letters—literary, commercial, political, religious, cultural, social, and military—which transformed them into powerful early modern tools. The Renaissance was an era that put letters into the hands of many kinds of people, inspiring them to see reading, writing, receiving, and sending letters as an essential feature of their identity. The authors take a fresh look at the correspondence of some of the most important humanists of the Italian Renaissance, including Niccolò Machiavelli and Isabella d'Este, and consider the use of letters for others such as merchants and physicians.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of Early Modern History and Literature, Renaissance Studies, and Italian Studies. The engagement with essential primary sources renders this book an indispensable tool for those teaching seminars on Renaissance history and literature.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: with a letter in hand—writing, communication, and
representation in Renaissance Italy
Portrait of a Renaissance letter
Writing, reading, and friendship
An epistolary guide to the volume
Notes
PART I: Late medieval commerce and scholarship
1. Letters, networks, and reputation among Francesco di Marco Datini and his correspondents
Doing business in Italy
Beyond the Datini enterprise: letters from North Africa
Household and network between Prato and Florence
Commercial letters, networks, and hierarchies
Notes
2. Ciriaco d’Ancona and the limits of the network
Merchant by necessity, humanist by aspiration
An occasional diplomat and passionate antiquarian
The limits of correspondence networks
Notes
PART II: Rulers and subjects
3. Saving Naples: the king’s Malaria, the Barons’ revolt, and the letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza
The crisis of 1475
Ippolita Maria Sforza: writer of letters
The malaria letters and the language of kinship
The periodicity of the king’s illness: 18–25 November
Intimations of a second Barons’ revolt
Notes
Epilogues
Appendix 1 A note on the history of malaria
Appendix 2 The malaria letters
4. Isabella d’Este’s Employee Relations
Notes
5. Letters as sources for studying Jewish conversion: the case of Salomone da Sesso/Ercole de’ Fedeli
Convert identity and self-fashioning in letters
Letters as amedium for debating conversionary policy
Letters on the spectacle of conversion
Abbreviations
Notes
PART III: Humanism, diplomacy, and empire
6. Writing a letter in 1507: the fortunes of Francesco Vettori’s correspondence and the Florentine Republic
Fortune smiles on Francesco: Vettori’s mandato
Mission impossible: Francesco Vettori’s fortunes in Germany
Confronting fortune: Vettori, Machiavelli and the Viaggio in Alemagna
Epilogue: the afterlife of arenaissance letter
Appendix
Notes
7. Minding gaps: connecting the worlds of Erasmus and Machiavelli
Erasmus at San Marco
Machiavelli’s “Erasmus”
Conclusion
Notes
8. The Cardinal’s Dearest Son and the pirate: Venetian empire and the letters of Giovan Matteo Bembo
Bembus Pater and the Dearest Son
The converging paths of Giovan Matteo Bembo and the Redbeard
Girolamo Ruscelli’s letters: printing Giovan Matteo Bembo and Barbarossa
Letters to a pirate
Conclusion
Notes
PART IV: Science and travel
9. The literary lives of health workers in late Renaissance Venice
Nicolò Massa: a lesson in trying too hard
Venetian learning without letters
Conclusion
Notes
10. A Florentine humanist in India: Filippo Sassetti, Medici agent by annual letter
Notes
11. “La verità delle stelle”: Margherita Sarrocchi’s letters to Galileo
Notes
PART V: Information, politics, and war
12. Publishing the Baroque post: the postal itinerary and the mailbag novel
Codogno’s itinerary
Pallavicino’s novel
Mercury’s mailbag
Notes
13. War, mobility, and letters at the start of the Thirty Years’ War (1621–23)
Roman ambitions, long-distance war, and letters
On the ground in Moravia
“So that Ican send myself where Iwant”
Conclusion
Notes
14. Making sense of the news: Micanzio’s letters, Cavendish, Bacon, and the Thirty Years’ War
‘Frendly commerce’: spirit and style
Philosophy and politics: contents
Prospect and point of view: the partisan’s perspective
Ottoman news: connections and comparisons
Current affairs, ancient histories, general maxims
From contingencies to conclusions: writing and reading hidden knowledge
Notes
Epilogue: lives full of letters—from Renaissance to Republic
of Letters
Notes
Index