Hilary Gatti is known for her scholarship on Giordano Bruno and on English literature. Therefore it is fitting that most of the contributions to this Festschrift connect the Renaissance and early modernity in Italy with that of England. The first seven chapters deal with imitation. Martin McLaughlin analyzes Giovanni Battista Alberti’s Musca in relation to Lukian, while Carlo Caruso shows emulation through change of objects, as Giovanni Gioviano Pontanore replaces the traditional laurel with the orange as poetic attributes. The third example is Celio Calcagnini. Nicola Gardini presents his De Profectu, a treatise of “omnivorous intertextuality” (44), based on the metaphor of shadow: alter ego, contrast, access to light, etc. Most conspicuous is the unapologetic adaptation of Lucretius, given that Epicurean physics had become respectable since the fifteenth century, while Lucretius’s ethics remained suspect of immorality.
Interaction was one of the signatures of the Renaissance. Giorgio Vasari, in writing the lives of artists, employed recent poets like Dante and Petrarch and made the equivalence of speech and art a ploy. Poetry, painting, friendship, desire, and fame — all participated in the same culture, as Lina Bolzoni shows. Occasional literature poses problems to the literary canons, as Jane E. Everson demonstrates with poems from sixteenth-century Italian academies. Those poems are embedded in their social and political context, which enhanced their refinement and sophistication. “We can best imitate nature by imitating Vergil”: this quotation from Julius Caesar Scaliger summarizes the efforts of early modern English poets to write metric and accentuated verse. Stephen Orgel discusses poems that through the English spelling and sounds reconcile “sweetness” with “majesty” (Sidney; 97). Philip Sidney was the dedicatee of Giordano Bruno’s Degli eroici furori. This dialogue is at the center of Eugenio Canone’s essay, which portrays Bruno as the philosopher of opposition to authority. The ideal of imitation cedes to that of invention — if any paradigm is to count at all, then, “in making the doctrines of the past live” (110).
Carrying on research by Hilary Gatti, Elisabetta Tarantino suggests that Bruno’s Candelaio contains allusions to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 in France, and thus was an inspiration for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew Fair. Bruno and England are also Tiziana Provvidera’s subject. She proposes to revert the known order of printing of the two versions of Bruno’s Cena. Her “tentative speculations” (147) assume deterioration of Bruno’s relation with the Earl of Leicester and his increased soliciting of the queen’s appreciation. Bruno’s trial and death keeps haunting the imagination of many. Ingrid D. Rowland nourishes it, however, with historic material. She describes the places of imprisonment and execution around 1600 and presents Caravaggio as a potential witness to the gruesomeness of justice.
An intriguing specimen of overhauling theories is offered by Germana Ernst (170–85). She reports on how Campanella abandoned Pythagorean cosmology in favor of Telesio and rethought Pythagoreanism after becoming convinced by Galileo’s discoveries. Marta Fattori publishes a number of documents from the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ACDF) regarding a Japanese legation to the pope in 1615. We gain insight into the commercial and spiritual aspects of interreligious negotiations in the era of colonization in Asia. Another refreshing look into the ACDF comes from Leen Spruit. He describes examples of heretical doctrines about the soul. There are naturalist errors (Juan Huarte, Sennert, and others), Neoplatonists like Francesco Patrizi, and some commentators on Aristotle like Zabarella. The Inquisition emerges as staffed with well-informed and sophisticated scholars. The book concludes with a bibliography of Hilary Gatti’s scholarly achievements since 1967.
