The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance

Christopher Celenza is Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University, Washington DC, where he has a joint appointment in History and Classics. He the author of several books including the prize-winning The Lost Italian Renaissance (2005) and Machiavelli: A Portrait (2015). His work has been featured in Salon, The Huffington Post, and on radio and television. Former Director of the American Academy in Rome, he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harvard University Center for the Study of the Italian Renaissance (Villa I Tatti), the American Academy in Rome, and the Fulbright Foundation.

1. Beginnings; 2. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio; 3. The Italian Renaissance takes root in Florence; 4. Florentine humanism, translation, and a new (old) philosophy; 5. Dialogues, institutions, and social exchange; 6. Who owns culture? Classicism, institutions, and the vernacular; 7. Poggio Bracciolini; 8. Lorenzo Valla; 9. The nature of the Latin language: Poggio versus Valla; 10. Valla, Latin, Christianity, culture; 11. A changing environment; 12. Florence: Marsilio Ficino, I; 13. Ficino, II; 14. The voices of culture in late fifteenth-century Florence; 15. 'We barely have time to breathe'. Poliziano, Pico, Ficino, and the beginning of the end of the Florentine Renaissance; 16. Angelo Poliziano's Lamia in context; 17. Endings and new beginnings: the language debate.