This rich bilingual collection of essays celebrates the extraordinary work of Jane Everson, whose seminal scholarship forms a crucial touchstone for Italian studies—and for the study of Renaissance literary culture at large. A central scope of the book is to offer a panorama of Everson’s current legacy in the field by gathering contributions written by colleagues and mentees on chivalric fiction, early modern academic networks, and transdisciplinary cultural dialogues. Some authors wrote on topics that, in a not too remote past, used to be overlooked by scholars: Cieco’s Mambriano for instance, the role of women and femininity in sixteenth-century epic poems and intellectual circles, or Giulio Camillo’s multimedia mnemonic techniques. Others opened new avenues of research on major canonical authors, or insisted upon understudied aspects of their masterpieces: from Machiavelli’s use of jokes to Ariosto’s reception of Savonarola’s preaching. The organization of the material makes it easy for readers to navigate the book, and it represents a statement per se: after the autumn of humanism, the most characteristic features of Italy’s culture still represented cohesive and exciting models within the fragmented horizon of the so-called ancien régime.
The first two sections (“Chivalry” and “Academy”) seem to exorcise, as suggested by the curators in the introduction, a cumbersome ghost: Francesco de Sanctis, the father of historical studies in Italian literature. Everson’s scholarship helped overcome the stigma of backwardness and conservatism that de Sanctis authoritatively cast on the two early modern institutions examined by the contributors. The essays show how successful such a turn was, giving meaning to the locution early modern itself as a category within the realm of Italian studies. Three contributions are devoted to the Orlando furioso, and in particular to canto 34 (and its textual surroundings). Letizia Panizza unearths the revival of Lucian of Samosata’s dialogues in the Estense court of Ferrara—from translations and influences emerged in the Quattrocento (one of her main fields of research) to Ariosto’s poem. The core of her essay is the lunar episode: Lucian’s is bridged, as a source, to Astolfo’s encounter with Saint John, and the author’s early virtual exile from the intricate woods of Ariosto’s commentaries is related to the shift of paradigms brought by the Reformation. Stefano Jossa focuses as well on Astolfo and Saint John, connecting the Furioso (as an intentionally and openly Christian poem) with contemporary religious debates. Nora Stoppino, on the other hand, encompasses cantos 34–36 in an analysis of Ariosto’s self-positioning within two traditions: classical epics and chivalric fiction. The essay challenges traditional genealogical readings of the Furioso, updating and reforging (also through a gendered perspective) Pio Rajna’s foundational lesson on the theme.
The six chapters about academies show how much the current research in this flourishing subfield relies on interdisciplinary and up-to-date methodologies. While Lina Bolzoni’s masterful introduction to the enigmas of Camillo’s L’idea del theatro naturally involves questions of philosophy, visual art, and even neuroscience, Lisa Sampson’s essay on Ingegneri’s Danza di Venere connects and merges political history, the history of performance practices, semiology, and women’s studies. A special attention for female protagonists is also central in Denis Reidy’s richly documented analysis of the evolution of printed illustrations in the history of Italian academies.
The last section of the book includes transnational studies, such as Daniela Cerimonia’s essay on the impact of Dante’s Purgatorio in Shelley’s Romantic vision of Italy (and of Italian literature, as a formal and philosophical model), and Alessandro Carducci’s study of the influence of Kipling on Gramsci’s public and private writings. In the same section, titled “Cultural Dialogues,” Carlo Caruso offers an interdisciplinary close reading of Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of Andrea Doria, while Luciano Parisi explores the interplay of music, masculinity, and postwar cultural history in Mario Soldati’s novel La giacca verde.
An interesting aspect of this festschrift is the rhythmical alternation of the contributions, organized in an almost Dantesque numerological order. Each section counts six chapters and is opened by an extraordinarily distinguished scholar (Brian Richardson from the US, Lina Bolzoni from Italy, and Anna Laura and Giulio Lepschy from the UK) discussing challenging topics that escape traditional frames of literary studies: vocal transmissions of Petrarch’s verse, Camillo’s theater of memory, and Berni’s Rifacimento of Boiardo’s Innamorato between oral and written language. Along with Everton (whose publications are listed in a closing appendix), these eminent scholars and their fifteen fellow authors form a remarkable group shot of different generations of Italianists between two continents.
