Francesco Petrarca is credited widely with having both introduced the image and foreshadowed the concept of an historical period known as the Dark or Middle Ages, in which he is said (and not only by the cited undergraduate) to have one foot, even as he imagined, and thereby helped bring into being, the future era of light and rebirth, at the origins of which we now so often place him.² Teachers and scholars continue to live happily, if sometimes uneasily, with the paradox of embodying a historical division of epochs in a figure who blurs the boundaries between them, as...

Even in an era of such literary-critical and theoretical sophistication and diversity as our own, when it often seems that no approach, no matter how implausible or inconsequential its results might be, will go untried, certain guiding assumptions can still be found that go on structuring and limiting and enabling the way we do our work without our full consent. The “critical unconscious” that makes even a savvy theoretical eye blink invariably produces blind spots in our interpretive vision, hiding what for later or earlier readers is most evident; but it also, often enough, leads us to see and to...

In the frame-tale of theDecameron, Boccaccio elaborates a utopian political, and ethical, order, which seems to realize in ideal form the mixed egalitarian and hierarchical tendencies of Florentine communal politics: the group of seven young women and three young men embraces the need for a monarchical rule from above, but then establishes the principle that each will occupy that office for a single day.¹ The egalitarian tendency extends into the dimension of gender roles as well. The community is founded and dominated by women, and its laws are provided by Pampinea, the Moses or Numa of thelieta brigata,...

The present essay has two complimentary aims, with a number of secondary points deriving therefrom. The first is to further explore a problem in Petrarch studies that is by now quite familiar, namely the author’s complex staging of his relationship to the world of politics, past and present,¹ with a particular focus on the tension he delineates and explores between his undoubted role as “public man” and his reiterated insistence on the essentially private nature of his existential and intellectual projects.² Here my argument will focus specifically on book 19 of his collected “familiar” letters (the Familiares), which contains a...

Machiavelli’sIl principe, as we have known for some time now, is not quite the radically new document in the history of Western political thought that it has so often been represented as being. Allan Gilbert, and after him a number of others,¹ have pointed to important formal and thematic ways that it participates in a specific and common humanistic genre: the educational treatise for the benefit of princes, itself part of a larger rhetorical, didactic mode that offers historical examples of ethical-political behavior for imitation (or avoidance) by its readers. The principal aim of my essay is to juxtapose...

It has now been almost two decades since a wave of historical and cultural criticism and theory reversed the dominant textualist trend in North American literary studies that had led us from the New Criticism through structuralism and into the theoretical arcana of poststructuralism. This shift, true to its own historical character, has never been absolute or “pure.” At its best, in fact, the imperative to “always historicize” has been complemented by a lingering textualist awareness of the complex and pervasive mediations that language and other forms of signifying representation must be accorded in any attempt to reestablish the bonds...

At the beginning of the thirty-seventh canto of the third and final edition of hisOrlando furioso¹—an episode marginal to the principal plots of the poem but central to its insistent thematics of sexuality and gender identity²—Ludovico Ariosto inserted a substantial proem in which he forcibly asserts and illustrates the noteworthiness of women’s accomplishments in all fields. Women’s deeds, he claims, are comparable to and perhaps even greater than those of their male counterparts. Here are the first three stanzas of what turns out to be the longest such exordium in the poem:

Se, come in acquistar qualch’altro...

The clear separation of the writing of history from literary writing has, in theoretical terms, if not always in practice, begun to blur over the last several decades, as disciplinary boundaries developed from the Enlightenment forward have been repeatedly questioned and tested. Under scrutiny are, on one hand, inherited canons of positivist historiography, and on the other, the autonomy of the field of literary aesthetics. The idea that history is both interpreted and produced by and through linguistic fictions, originally associated with names such as Michel Foucault and Hayden White,¹ has gained adherents, though not without significant, and in some...

Like much Counter-Reformation writing, Tasso’s epic of the Crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem represents and then represses several varieties of threatening difference—religious, sexual, racial, psychological, even textual. In his fundamental study of theLiberata, Sergio Zatti (1983, partially translated in 2006: chs. 6–7) has shown that the struggle of the “uniforme cristiano” to overcome the “multiforme pagano,” that is, the heterodox multiplicity of the Islamic “other,” can be read as an overt allegory of internal difference and otherness. Zatti identifies several strata of internal “difference” and deviation: the tensions within the Christian camp itself (the “compagni erranti” of Goffredo...