The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy
by: Christopher S. Celenza

Softcover. Baltimore MD, Johns Hopkins University, 1st pbk., 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 210 pages. Historian and literary scholar Christopher Celenza argues that serious interest in the intellectual life of Renaissance Italy can be reinvigorate, and the nature of the Renaissance itself re-accessed, by recovering a major part of its intellectual and cultural activity that has been largely ignored since the Renaissance was first "discovered": the vast body of works-literary, philosophical, poetic, and religious-written in Latin. Produced between the mid-fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries by major figures such as Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, and Leon Battista Alberti, as well as minor but interesting thinkers like Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger, this literature was initially overlooked by scholars of the Renaissance because they were not written in the vernacular Italian which alone was seen as was the supreme expression of a culture. Clean copy.