Italian Bookshelf
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ITALIAN BOOKSHELF Edited by Dino S. Cervigni and Anne Tordi As of the 2008 issue, book reviews are published exclusively online. Please visit the journal’s website for the complete text: www.ibiblio.org/annali GENERAL & MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES Christian Thorsten Callisen, ed. Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle. Essays in Honour of Gary Ianziti. Burlington (VT): Ashgate, 2014. Pp. 257. This collection of essays, offered as a tribute to Gary Ianziti, has been contributed by an international cast of academics who share with the man they honour the same broad and thorough methodological approach to historical studies. This richly deserved Festschrift is a fitting homage to a distinguished scholar, whose groundbreaking works have made an impressive contribution to research in the wide area of historiography. As the title of this volume suggests, Ianziti’s subtle analyses range from studies on humanist historical writings — such as his seminal monograph on fifteenth-century Milanese historians (Humanist Historiography under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) — to reflections on contemporary issues, such as his essay on the controversial work of the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle (“Historiography and its Discontents: The Windschuttle Gambit,” History Australia 2.2 (2005), pp. 43-1/43-10). In particular, Ianziti’s studies on Italian humanism offer illuminating answers on the political dimension of humanist historiography, highlighting its propagandistic function within the historical context of the Italian Quattrocento. His works pay specific attention to the investigation of archive documents and sources, focusing also on exploring specific historiographical genres that enjoyed widespread diffusion in the humanist age, such as commentarii. These research practices emerge as recurrent elements in the essays in this miscellaneous volume. The editor sets out the ambitious goal for the volume in the introduction, by placing three main topics of Ianziti’s investigations as central pillars of the collection. Through this claim, the tripartite structure of the miscellany is illustrated clearly: the first section is devoted to “tensions and challenges of writing history in the Renaissance” (11); the second focuses on individuals’ works and explores the role played by philosophical and political scenarios in the practice of reading and writing history in early modern Europe; finally, the last section looks at the crucial function of literary genres in historical writings, with specific attention to the contemporary age. This introduction leads the reader into the book, giving a brief overview of each contribution and 386 Annali d’italianistica, volume 33 (2015). Italian Bookshelf underlining the well-organized structure of the compilation, which follows chronological and thematic criteria. Before the description of contents, the introduction offers a biographical profile of Ianziti, divided into two sections. “Gary the Person” traces the life and career of the scholar, starting from his childhood in California when he used to spend many hours in the “venerable old Goodman Library” (2). The second section, “‘Sure-handed and subtle’: Ianziti the Author,” is devoted to Ianziti’s work, recalling his pioneering research achievements and his instant passion for Renaissance history “since his early forays into the archives in Florence with Riccardo Fubini” (9), one of Ianziti’s “chief guides” along with James Hankins. Thanks to its cohesive underlying structure, the collection avoids the danger of losing focus and maintains a consistent connection among multiple themes. In the first essay, Andrea Rizzi examines fifteenth-century translators’ methods, taking an original approach that does not make a distinction between Latin and vernacular versions and employs paratextual sources to shed light on different translation practices. Next, John Gagné’s well-documented study analyses the evolution of Milanese historical writings after the fall of the Sforza in 1499. The scholar’s declared aim is to follow in the footsteps of Ianziti’s method by “evaluating the relationship between an author’s sources and his political and intellectual environment” (35). In the third essay, Jane Black offers a richly documented examination of the circumlocutions and names used to refer to the duchy of Milan in historical writings between 1400 and 1540, pointing out how the evasive techniques for naming the duchy were the result of its lack of official definition as a territorial domain. The second section opens with James Hankins’s subtle analysis of Leonardo Bruni’s views on the “legitimacy of constitutions,” conducted through a close linguistic examination of the humanist’s terminology. This well-crafted essay expands on the innovative perspective that Hankins developed in his previous works, which reconsiders the concept of “civic humanism” and republican ideology in the Italian Quattrocento. In the next contribution, Robert Black traces the development of Machiavelli’s writing style in relation to the sixteenth-century political context, underlining the connections and dissimilarities between his narrative techniques and humanist historiography. The following two essays shift the focus to the German historical and philosophical environment between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Christian Callisen provides a close examination of Georg Calixtus’s De studio historiarum oratio and demonstrates the significant contribution of the German theologian’s text to humanist debate on the theory and practice of history. Next, Ian Hunter offers a clever analysis of Christian Thomasius’s natural law, contextualizing it within the complex religious and political scenario of the making of the early modern German state. In the closing section, Chris Hanlon explores the genre of hagiography, taking into consideration the cultural background within which hagiographical accounts were produced. The last three contributions push the chronological boundary 387 Annali d’italianistica, volume 33 (2015). Italian Bookshelf forward into the Novecento. Catherine Dewhirst brings a fresh perspective to the study of migrant history in Australia, by analyzing a corpus of letters written by Italian immigrants from 1900 to 1915. Sue Keays then provides an intriguing reading of Robert Graves’s novels on the Roman emperor Claudius (I, Claudius, and Claudius the God) and examines how these twentieth-century historical fictions are influenced by classical sources. Finally, John Headley traces the development of the “Western tradition” as a process towards a “universal, all- inclusive human community” (214), grounding his considerations in macro- historical views. In summary, this volume is an excellent resource for scholars in different branches of historical research, as it offers significant case studies mostly based on pivotal tenets of Ianziti’s works, and, for the same reason, it may appeal also to a readership interested in literature and philosophy. The main unifying factor of the compilation is Ianziti’s methodological approach, which can be regarded as the connection between wide-ranging studies, whose chronological, geographical and thematic scope is quite broad, ranging across different epochs and continents from Italian humanism to twentieth-century Australia. Marta Celati, University of Oxford Franco Cassano. Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean. Ed. and trans. Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. 212. Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean is, to some degree, two small books in one. Book one would extend from page 1 to page 103, and the second book would run from page 105 to page 153. This, of course, does not include another forty-plus pages of endnotes, an extensive bibliography, and a substantial index of names and terms. Further still, it includes an excellent introduction by the two editors that nicely contextualizes Cassano and his ideas as expressed in these two “small books.” Why do I make this distinction? First, because Cassano’s original text entitled Il pensiero meridiano (Laterza, 1996) is a stand-alone volume that constitutes the above-mentioned book one of the volume that I have in hand. First published in 1996, Il pensiero meridiano is part of a bouquet of books dealing, once more, with the “Southern Question.” Thus, to have here the text in its original version, not overshadowed albeit not that greatly, runs the risk of a semiotic adumbration of signification when it comes to the foundational thought process behind Il pensiero meridiano. The reader, that is, does not stop with Cassano’s organic essay on “southern thought.” Rather, s/he continues to modify her/his acquisition of information by the reading of further material. The second reason for such a distinction is because Il pensiero meridiano (1996) is part of a series of publications that began to revisit the notion of “The 388 Annali d’italianistica, volume 33 (2015). Italian Bookshelf South.” Indeed, Vito Teti’s 1993 La razza maladetta (Manifesto Libri) can readily be considered one of the original texts of this new wave of re-thinking Italy’s “Southern Question.” In his book, he critiqued the long wave of arguments that spoke to an inferior South and Southerners, theories with origins in Napoleone Colajanni, Alfredo Niceforo, and Cesare Lombroso. Teti was followed by, for example, an economically based analysis of the “southern