Physician, anthropologist, sexologist, traveler, novelist, politician, Paolo Mantegazza is probably the most eclectic figure in late nineteenth-century Italian culture. A very prolific writer, extremely popular during his lifetime both in Italy and abroad, he can be considered a forerunner of what has now come to be known as "cultural studies" for his interdisciplinary approach, his passionate blend of scientific and literary elements in his writings, and his ability to transcend the boundaries between "high" and "low" culture.

Of this great provocateur and popularizer of knowledge, who persistently broached controversial physiological, moral, social, and political issues in his over one hundred works, the present volume collects representative examples, most of which are translated into English for the first time. In addition to the unabridged English version of Physiology of Love, a veritable bestseller at the time of its publication, selections include Mantegazza's groundbreaking essay On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca and substantial excerpts from two of his travelogues (A Voyage to Lapland and India), his epistolary novel One Day in Madeira and his treatise on materialistic aesthetics Epicurus. Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful. As suggestions for further readings, the volume finally proposes brief passages from additional works by Mantegazza, ranging from science fiction (The Year 3000), pedagogical literature (Head) and personal memoirs (Political Memoirs of a Foot-Soldier in the Italian Parliament), to social and cultural criticism (The Neurosic Century and The Tartuffe Century).

This volume does not only introduce readers to a pioneering and captivating "Renaissance man", but also maps the circulation of ideas and the crossfertilization of disciplines in a complex and contradictory period of Italian and European cultural life.

The sixteenth century in Italy was an age of theater. Initially, there were but folk dramas, particularly at Christmas and Carnival tides, and plays performed within the schools and confraternities based on the scattered few works surviving from the Roman theater—largely as exercises in Latin. But as that classical repertory was increased in the fifteenth century through the discovery of additional plays by Plautus, and, in turn, became the object of humanist enquiry and the basis for “erudite” productions in the academies and schools in such centers as Rome, Florence and Venice, newly-written plays based on these classical models became a destiny soon to be made manifest. The story of playwrighting in the classical tradition, but now in the Italian vernacular and in prose for popular audiences, can be traced more specifically to ideas arising in Ferrara in the early 1500s. No less a writer than Ariosto set his hand to imitating the ancients in a series of plays written for the Duke of that city. The challenge was an emerging one: no more pedantic translations from the Latin, in verse, that could only be rescued by the distractions of the music, dance, and mime shows performed between the acts. These “new” plays were to become their own centers of attraction, with deferences to be sure to the ancient drama in terms of ethos and proportions, even episodes and character types, but now with contemporary settings, using the language of everyday speech, modern allusions and engaging plots. The date was 1508 for Ariosto’s Cassaria, while his I suppositi or The Pretenders, included in the present collection, was performed the following year. This latter was an engaging play about student life and love performed against a huge painted backdrop of Ferrara itself—a court performance accompanied by elaborate spectacles of mime and music, manifesting, at the same time, the opulent powers of the Duke himself.

The idea was soon to spread to other courts, and most particularly to Urbino where, for the festive season of 1513, Cardinal Bibbiena’s paradigmatic Calandra was first brought to life. Bibbiena preserved the spirit of classical design, but introduced episodes from the Italian novella, and inaugurated the experimentation in compound actions that would lead to the remarkable triple plots represented in this collection by the plays of Caro, Piccolomini, and Bruno. Machiavelli’s justly famous Mandragola or The Mandrake was written in these same years around a single but novel trickster intrigue that balances precariously between a realist’s approach to stolen love and trenchant satire implicit in the contorted values of everyone in the play right down to a member of the clergy. The tones, procedures, and thematic preoccupations that would mark this theater throughout the century down to Della Porta’s The Sister, written close to the year 1590, are, in fact, already in evidence in these few plays. On the one hand there are plots involving sets of lovers struggling against the oppositions of fortune, family and rivals. This is clearly the case in Caro’s The Ragged Brothers and Piccolomini’s Alessandro, as it is in Della Porta’s The Sister. But on the other hand, these plays introduce us to a variety of pedants and boobies, braggart soldiers and gluttons, bullies and prankster servants, many with their counterparts in the ancient plays, but who now represent the affectations of modern life. They become the universal expressions of human folly or marginal cunning in the underdog logic of survival by force or fraud, the cowardice of the martial boaster, the disproportionate desires for food, sex, and money, not to mention their religious and social hypocrisy—all of these characters evoking overtones of satire. In some of these plays, the love motifs dominate, leading to closure in terms of marriage and the redistribution of wealth to the younger generations, while in others, the satiric intent takes over the action leading to a finale in exposure, ridicule, and castigation. The satiric tradition is most forcefully represented in the present collection by Ariosto’s disillusioned, frank, and nearly cruel Cortigiana of 1525, excoriating the corruptions of aristocratic and papal Rome, and by Bruno’s playfully decadent and provocatively perverse Candlebearer, written at the beginning of the 1580s. Even further variety is represented: by the Moschetta of Ruzzante with its strange mixture of popular farce, harsh social realism from the time of the military invasions of the Veneto, classical form, and empathy for the very human imperfections of its appetite-driven characters; by the recursion to the popular farce in the short play by Grazzini; and by the student aventures with married women, one of them the wife of an old codger besotted by love for one of the student’s mothers in Cecchi’s The Horned Owl. All of these plays represent changes upon established themes, but with such recombinant ingenuity that audiences found themselves delighted by the rejigging of the familiar into stage actions that seemed to exceed the representational capacities of the single-piazza-and-houses setting common to all the plays.

Around these texts and their performances there were several “economies” at work. They had to escape the narrow repertory of scenarios and character types of their Roman originals, and yet, by some magic cognitive function, these playwrights had to preserve the concentration, limited spatial conventions, speed, and social ethos of their classical models. In parallel with these creations and their performances was an extensive academic debate on the nature and “rules” of the “erudite” or “regular” comedy, with its defining properties as set out by Donatus, implicitly by Aristotle, and by the plays themselves of Plautus and Terence. For the sake of novelty, in this economy, artists were constantly fudging the conventions, testing the margins, yet declaring their allegiances to the tradition. In another economy, states and potentates had an eye on the satirists in an effort to impose limits on the subversion and disruption that masqueraded as honest pique or playful ragging. As the century wore one, that censorious spirit would express itself increasingly, not through the reactions of the specifically maligned, but through the measures of Counter-Reformation churchmen intent upon curtailing all things ribald, anti-clerical, and egregiously salacious to the point of attempting to shut down all theatrical activity diversely in Rome, Florence and Milan. These plays, then, are part of a dynamic social history that begins in the festivals of state of the Medicis and d’Estes, and that ends nearly underground in the academies and private theaters. It is a theater of realism and sheer artifice, of psychological portraits both individual and collective, as well as of stock masks and stereotypes. It borrows from the social anecdotes of the day to the point of stylizing historical characters, as in Caro’s “ragged brothers,” yet takes over scenarios from Boccaccio, and from the commedia dell’arte, as well as from the ancient playwrights. In a larger context, this repertory of plays had an enormous influence in the emerging theaters of Spain, France, and to a lesser extent, England. The purpose of the present two-volume collection is to provide a representative number of, arguably, the best and most influential of these plays such as they appeared throughout the century, in a diversity of centers with their local traditions and constraints. Together, these plays constitute a cross-section of a genre surrounded by debate, dynamic in its relation to an aesthetic age, yet quintessentially marked by a defining unity of conventions and humanist loyalties. The sampling should be sufficient to permit readers to engage in their own intertextual musings as they detect the rich motivic and structural interplay that joins these works together in a single grand theatrical experiment—one that integrated itself into the social fabric of Renaissance Italy.  

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oratio De Hominis Dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man)

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a young prodigy and count of Concord, was at the center of one of the most famous events of the Renaissance. Blessed with genius, good looks and fortune, Pico published in 1486, at the tender age of twenty-three, his Nine Hundred Conclusions, a monumental compendium of truths gleaned from all major ancient traditions (including Arabic philosophy, Greek Neo-Platonism, Hebrew Cabbala and Persian magic). He intended to debate these truths publicly and to demonstrate their inherent compatibility before an audience comprised of Pope Innocent VIII and a council of Church theologians. But this debate never took place. The Papal commission appointed to investigate the doctrinal accuracy of the theses found thirteen of them to be either heretical or unorthodox. Pico fled to France where he was apprehended and briefly detained on the Pope’s orders. Banished and excommunicated, he later regained his freedom, thanks to the intervention of his friend Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The most enduring legacy of this episode is Pico’s never-delivered prolusion to the debate, the so-called Oration on the Dignity of Man, a work that has for centuries been considered a true manifesto of Renaissance spirit and thought. The present edition of the Oration includes: a thoroughly revised Latin text based on the editio princeps (Bologna, 1496), the extant (partial) manuscript at the National Library in Florence, and the relevant sections of Pico’s Apologia (Naples 1487); an updated English translation; and a detailed commentary by an international group of scholars who are actively involved in the collaborative online Pico Project. The Pico Project is sponsored by the University of Bologna (Italy) and Brown University.