This volume collects six essays, five previously published between 2004 and the present, focusing on one or more of three related aspects of Roman humanism in the early sixteenth century: the peculiar character of Latin oratory in Rome, the nature and uses of poetry in the city, and the import of this literary production for Romanitas. Together, the essays depict a brief yet important cultural moment — roughly from the death of Pomponio Leto (1498) to the Sack of 1527 — in which Latin eloquence was essentially performative. It was a moment, moreover, when the “perfect eloquence of the ancients” played a particularly defining role in the civic identity of Rome.

Benedetti is primarily a miniaturist, devoting his attention to the careful description and interpretation of fascinating, often neglected texts. He prefers to take an oblique approach, for the most part concentrating not on the foremost exponents of the Roman milieu but on the works and reputations of younger and more marginal figures. Some of these, moreover, are outsiders who failed in their attempts to integrate themselves into the Roman sphere. This emphasis on the aspiring and the excluded, this focus on the boundaries of group identity, throws the nature of Roman humanism in the first three decades of the sixteenth century into particularly high relief.

Chapter 1 illustrates the character of Latin oratory in Rome by way of a 1501 letter from Agostino Vespucci to Niccolò Machiavelli, which describes a speech by an unknown humanist declaiming in the peculiar Roman style. What emerges is the primacy of actio and pronuntiatio over inventio and elocutio. To be considered a good orator in Rome, the acknowledged home of oratory, one had to be able to perform — with facial expressions, tonal inflections, and bodily gestures. This theme crops up throughout the book and is addressed again explicitly in chapter 6, which is devoted to the ut pictura eloquentia topos in the literary criticism of Paolo Cortesi (De hominibus doctis, ca. 1490) and Paolo Giovio (Ischian Dialogue, 1528). The latter uses color as a metaphor to depict delivery and identifies it as the sine qua non of Roman oratory in the period from Julius II to Clement VII. Actio is also a key category in chapter 4, a reinterpretation of Celso Mellini's speech protesting the grant of Roman citizenship to Christophe de Longueil. The Belgian humanist's poor delivery and barbarous pronunciation disqualified him, in Mellini's view, although equally damaging were his earlier attacks on Rome. The issue of Latin style and Roman civic identity is treated in chapters 2 and 3 as well. The former describes the failure of Giovan Battista Pio's Bolognese Apuleianism, as showcased in his 1512 inaugural lecture at the Studium urbis, to win the acceptance of the Roman establishment (which naturally demanded a strict Ciceronianism). The latter investigates a satirical biography of Giulio Simone Siculo, as well as a burlesque commentary mocking the mediocre poetry of his most precocious work, the Epulum populi Romani (1513), to illustrate the young Sicilian's inability to penetrate the ranks of Roman humanism. These ranks were open to qualified outsiders, however, as can be seen in the Lacrimae (1520), a collection of funeral poetry commemorating the death of Celso Mellini (chapter 5). Its elegies were contributed by all the great humanists of the city, many of whom were not themselves natives. Their compositions are characteristic of Roman poetry in the period, written in strictly classicizing Latin, with no admixture of the vernacular and very little of Greek.

The great benefit of this book is that it has brought scattered essays of high quality together in one easily accessible place. Sadly, little more has been made of the occasion. Apart from a few cross-references in the footnotes and revisions to chapter 3, the only innovation is a brief introduction of an almost wholly rhetorical nature; a mere nod is made in the direction of synthesis. Finally, it should be noted that the work's elevated literary style, highly allusive nature, and multitudinous untranslated Latin passages — admittedly all virtues in Italian scholarship — will make it inaccessible to all but the most expert or diligent reader. Ultimately, it is a book for a small audience of insiders; they will treasure its curiositas.