Renaissance Research Project
Literary Sources I
What literary sources are available
to historians of the Italian
Renaissance?
• Letters
• Fiction
• Dialogues
Letter from Vespasiano da Bisticci
to Cosimo de’ Medici
Niccolò Machiavelli
Letters written by
chancellors and
magistrates
Importance of Florentine
chancery
Letter by Petrarch
Francesco Datini,
wrote 140,000
letters
Raymond de Roover,
study of Medici Bank
Letter from
Alessandra Strozzi
to her son Filippo
Letters to friends
Studied by FW Kent and Richard Trexler
Reveal tensions and codes of friendship
Kent: “We can hear the voices of people talking.”
Aeneas Sylvius
Piccolomini (later
Pope Pius II),
The Tale of Two
Lovers (1444)
Your letters I sought for long and diligently; and finally, where I least
expected it, I found them. At once I read them, over and over, with the
utmost eagerness…I long had known how excellent a guide you have
proved for others; at last I was to learn what sort of guidance you gave
yourself.
Now it is your turn to be the listener. Hearken, wherever you are, to the
words of advice, or rather of sorrow and regret, that fall, not unaccompanied
by tears, from the lips of one of your successors, who loves you faithfully
and cherishes your name. O spirit ever restless and perturbed in old age-I
am but using your own words-self involved in calamities and ruin! what
good could you think would come from your incessant wrangling, from all
this wasteful strife and enmity? Where were the peace and quiet that
befitted your years, your profession, your station in life? … How much better
it would have been, how much more fitting for a philosopher, to have grown
old peacefully in the country, meditating, as you yourself have somewhere
said, upon the life that endures for ever, and not upon this poor fragment of
life…Farewell, forever, my Cicero.
Written in the land of the living; on the right bank of the Adige, in Verona, a
city of Transpadane Italy; on the 16th of June, and in the year of that God
whom you never knew the 1345th.
Other Authors with Published
Correspondence
Pietro Aretino
Bartolomeo Fonzio
Veronica Franco
Lorenzo de Medici
Niccolò Machiavelli
Michelangelo
Alessandra Strozzi
Cassandra Fedele
Fiction – Tales, Poetry, and Plays
Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, Love, Death
and Money in the
Pays d’Oc
Tales as Historical Sources
Lauro Martines, An
Italian Renaissance
Sextet: Six Tales in
Historical Context
Early Tales
Novellino (late 13th century)
Sources:
Classical
Latin Medieval
Biblical
Indian
Byzantine
French
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Tuscan Authors
Giovanni Boccaccio,
Certaldo
Franco Sacchetti,
Florence
Giovanni Sercambi,
Lucca
Gentile Sermini,
Siena
Plays and Poetry
Leon Battista Alberti
Ariosto
Pietro Bembo
Boiardo
Francesco Filelfo
Tasso
Laura Battiferra
Plays edited by
Laura Giannotti
and Guido
Ruggiero
Veronica Franco
Lorenzo de’ Medici
Michelangelo
Petrarch
Plays edited by
Bruce Penman
Dialogues
Ancient Origins
Plato
Xenophon
Aristotle
Cicero
Leonardo Bruni,
Dialogues for Pier
Paolo Vergerio (1401)
Raphael, Portrait
of Baldassare
Castiglione
(1478-1529)
The Book of the
Courtier
Raphael, Portrait
of Guidobaldo da
Montefeltro, duke
of Urbino
(1472-1508)
Raphael, Portrait
of Elisabetta
Gonzaga,
duchess of
Urbino
(1471-1526)
Sala delle veglie,
Palazzo ducale,
Urbino
Querelle de femmes
Moderata Fonte, The
Worth of Women:
Wherein is clearly
revealed their nobility
and their superiority to
men
Lucrezia Marinella, The
Nobility and Excellence
of Women and the
Defects and Vices of
Men
Cassandra Fedele, Laura Cereta, Christine de Pizan