Michael Marullus Tarchaniota’s De laudibus Rhacusae and His Early Years Vedran Stojanović Introduction This paper is divided into two parts, the first of which provides an analysis of the historical and biographical sources related to Michael Marullus Tarchaniota, while the second casts light on his poetic work. A structure such as this suggests that attempts to reconstruct a poet’s biography call for a clear-cut distinction between the poet’s real personality and his poetic persona (Nichols 1997, cited in Haskell 1999: 111). In the present case one may easily be led astray due to very sparse reliable information and because previous scientific papers mainly underlined the autobiographic features of Marullus’ production. The fact that Croatian literary scholarship (not only contemporary)1 has completely neglect- ed Marullus comes as an additional drawback to this study. The earliest years of Michael Marullus (?-Volterra, 1500)2, a prolific Human- ist poet of Greek origin, remain rather obscure. The place and the year of his 1 Without analysing Marullus’ work, Neven Jovanović mentions the poet in two of his articles devoted to the praises of the cities (Jovanović 2011, 2012). 2 Michael Marullus Tarchaniota belongs to a wide group of Greek poets who left for Italy after the fall of the Byzantine Empire and significantly contributed to the shaping of the Italian Humanism. He spent most of his life in Naples and the end of his days in Florence, where he enjoyed the company of the most prominent exponents of the Medicean Humanism. Vedran Stojanović, University of Dubrovnik, Croatia,
[email protected], 0000-0002-9469-3738 FUP Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (DOI 10.36253/fup_best_practice) Vedran Stojanović, Michael Marullus Tarchaniota’s De laudibus Rhacusae and His Early Years, pp.