This volume groups together twelve essays initially presented at a graduate conference organized by the Yale Department of Italian Language and Literature in 2009. The various contributions encompass different disciplines and fields, namely, literature and cultural history, political science, history, religious studies/church history, philology, and philosophy, for the period known as the Italian Renaissance.

Divided into four parts, this collection begins with an introduction authored by both editors. Under the rubric “New Boundaries of the New World,” part 1 includes two essays: “The Emergence of Modernity and the New World” by Giuseppe Mazzotta, and “The Voyage of Columbus as a ‘non pensato male’: The Search for Boundaries, Grammar, and Authority in the Aftermath of the New World Discoveries” by Erin McCarthy-King. Mazzotta’s essay effectively explains how “the discoveries of New Worlds by the likes of Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Vasco de Gama came out of the intellectual challenges and ways of thinking articulated by Florentine Quattrocento” (15), while McCarthy-King’s essay shows that the questione della lingua — so central to Renaissance/Cinquecento and Seicento literature — can be viewed also as a response/reaction to the discovered New World.

Part 2 bears as its rubric “Political Foundations” and lists the following four essays: “The Diplomatic Genre before the Italian League: Civic Panegyrics of Bruni, Poggio, and Decembrio” by Michael Komorowski; “The Gift of Liberty and the Ambitious Tyrant: Leonardo da Vinci as a Political Thinker, between Republicanism and Absolutism” by Marco Versiero; “Il mestiere delle armi: Renaissance Technology and the Cinema” by Daniel Leisawitz; “Machiavelli’s Use of Livy in Discourses 1.11–15” by Jason Taylor. Komorowski turns to the five decades preceding the Italian League in order to examine overlooked aspects of Quattrocento diplomacy, while Versiero reveals aspects of Leonardo’s political thought thanks to an interpretation of the artist’s lexicon that sheds light on its political meaning. Leisawitz’s long essay takes us into the world of Ermanno Olmi’s 2001 film on the last days of Giovanni de’ Medici (Giovanni dalle Bande Nere), and shows how Olmi’s film techniques and tropes, together with his own use of literary and historical sources, masterfully portray old times and momentous events, while also highlighting moral implications still relevant today. Taylor looks at the first section of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy in order to better address Machiavelli’s classicism and innovation as reflected in his treatment of the history and religion of the Romans and of his own days.

“Theological Foundations” is the general subject of part 3, which contains: “Ficinian Theories as Rhetorical Devices: The Case of Girolamo Savonarola” by Lorenzo Tromboni; “Renaissance Anthropologies and the Conception of Man” by Caroline Stark; “Sebastiano Castellio’s Doctrine of Tolerance between Theological Debate and Modernity” by Stefania Salvadori; and “Harmony and Letter, Syncretism and Literalism” by Toby Levers. The essay by Tromboni has the merit of uncovering and explaining Fra Girolamo Savonarola’s references and echoes of Ficinian philosophy, thereby revealing proximities not discussed in previous scholarship concerning the respective views and doctrines of the Ferrarese preacher and the Florentine philosopher. Tackling the central and much-discussed conception of man during the Renaissance, Caroline Stark traces the medieval roots of such a conception. She also points at the Reformation and the late sixteenth-century developments of the conception of man, which she sees as part of an anthropology that celebrates the role of labor and the importance of knowledge for the overcoming of man’s condition. Thoroughly examining Castellio’s writings, Salvadori underlines the distance between Castellio’s position and the reformed orthodoxy of John Calvin on the paramount issue of salvation. She clearly elaborates on Castellio’s model of theological truths that are “comprehensible,” and those that are “necessary to salvation,” leading to the essential distinction between theological truths required to gain salvation and those that can be ignored or misinterpreted without divine punishment. Traveling across the many centuries of allegorical interpretation that separate Saint Augustine from Pico della Mirandola, Levers offers a welcomed contribution with his nuanced discussion on the sensus literalis understood as the “‘foundation’ of all interpretation” (235).

The final two essays grouped in part 4, under the rubric “Literary History,” are titled, respectively, “Furor and Philology in the Poetics of Angelo Poliziano” by James K. Coleman, and “The Geography of the Enemy: Old and New Empires between Humanist Debates and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate” by Andrea Moudarres. These are rich essays, the first of which, by Coleman, tackles the crucial theory of poetic frenzy in Ficino, Landino, and Poliziano, the latter marking a significant departure in Moudarres’s own exploration of the theme of frenzy. Reading side by side Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and the Dialoghi, Moudarres befittingly problematizes Tasso’s view of the Christian empire in a time of Islamic expansion and of New World explorations.

An index of names closes this collection of studies that would certainly benefit graduate students or young scholars of the Italian Renaissance.