Marrapodi Michele - The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture

This wide-ranging collection brings together the best current work in Anglo-Italian studies and forecasts future developments. Theoretically sophisticated and intellectually rigorous, the essays here treat major and minor figures, works, and genres, all the while illuminating hidden movements and cross-currents in literature, history, theology, and other disciplines. The volume, in toto, documents the reciprocal circulation of energies that powered both the Italian and English Renaissances. Prof. Marrapodis international team of distinguished contributors and bright new voices will inspire and guide scholarly conversations for a long time to come.

Robert S. Miola Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of English / Lecturer in Classics Loyola University Maryland

Reading this new collection, one is taken aback by how extensive and profound the cultural conversation between early modern Italy and England actually was. Preceded by a deeply researched introduction by Michele Marrapodi, the essays manage to anatomize this dauntingly complex field afresh and rethink familiar figures and configurations while adding a host of unfamiliar ones. What emerges is not just the one-way traffic of influence but dynamic and layered exchanges both within and between two separate cultures and cultural moments. It is equally good at recounting the Italian rediscovery of ancient figures, such as Seneca and Lucretius (long prior to their English impact), as it is at exploring original Italian cultural inventions such as courtliness, civil conversation, and reason of state.

John Gillies Professor in Literature, University of Essex

In this ambitious and extraordinarily useful volume, ably assembled by Michele Marrapodi, distinguished senior and junior scholars from Italy, Great Britain, and North America revisit the crucial questions surrounding the influence of Italy, its literature and its culture on England in the age of Shakespeare. Among the volumes many virtues are its double focus on the original Italian texts and contexts and their appropriation, transformation, and re-visioning in English hands. Equally admirable is its revisitation of the multiple still-valid acquisitions of past scholarship, even while defining the current state of the field and its future possibilities. Finally, while the volumes primary inspiration is literary and especially theatrical, it demonstrates a laudable commitment to probing the mobilities, ambiguities, and political-ideological-religious investments that inform the complex processes of cultural transmission.

Albert Russell Ascoli President, Dante Society of America, Terrill Distinguished Professor, Dept. of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

The aim of this Companion volume is to provide scholars and advanced graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research work on Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies. Written by a team of international scholars and experts in the field, the chapters are grouped into two large areas of influence and intertextuality, corresponding to the dual way in which early modern England looked upon the Italian world from the English perspective Part 1: Italian literature and culture and Part 2: Appropriations and ideologies. In the first part, prominent Italian authors, artists, and thinkers are examined as a direct source of inspiration, imitation, and divergence. The variegated English response to the cultural, ideological, and political implications of pervasive Italian intertextuality, in interrelated aspects of artistic and generic production, is dealt with in the second part. Constructed on the basis of a largely interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers an in-depth and wide-ranging treatment of the multifaceted ways in which Italys material world and its iconologies are represented, appropriated, and exploited in the literary and cultural domain of early modern England. For this reason, contributors were asked to write essays that not only reflect current thinking but also point to directions for future research and scholarship, while a purposefully conceived bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a detailed index round off the volume.

Michele Marrapodi is a Full Professor of English Literature at the University of Palermo, Italy. He is General Editor of the Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies series. His most recent edited volumes include Shakespeares Italy (1993), The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama (1998), Italian Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1999), Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality (2004), Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2007), Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories (2011), Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance (2014), and Shakespeare and the Visual Arts: The Italian Influence (2017).

First published 2019

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A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-472-41073-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-61272-0 (ebk)

To Virginia,

Donna pietosa e di novella etate,
adorna assai di gentilezze umane.

Marco Andreacchio is a specialist of the Italian Renaissance and was awarded a doctorate for his work on Sino-Japanese philosophical literature in dialogue with western philosophical classics (Illinois) and a doctorate for his work on Dantes Platonic interpretation of religious authority (Cambridge, UK). Having published various academic articles, mostly on Dante and Vico, since 2012, Dr Andreacchio has been an editor for Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Having recently conducted three years of research at the Sorbonne (on Petrarch, Pico and Valla), Dr Andreacchio currently resides in Lyon, France, as a dedicated educator and reviver of Baroque painting.

Richard Andrews is Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of Leeds, UK, having retired from teaching in 2001. He is the author of Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1993); and The Commedia dellArte of Flaminio Scala: A Translation and Analysis of 30 Scenarios (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2008). Other essays on early modern Italian theatre have dealt with the rise of the female performer; with relationships between spoken drama and early opera; and with Italian influence on French and English drama. He is currently pursuing a project on classical European comedy between 1500 and 1800.