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Heraldry is a well-defined and, almost by definition, narrow subject; a “feudal language,” with codified rules, attributes, and a history that has been told many times. Originating in medieval Europe around the invention of full-body armor, the culture of jousting and tournaments, notions of heredity, strong corporate institutions, and the practice of genealogy, it was common throughout the so-called ancien régime. Its fortunes are widely thought to have declined in the Italian Renaissance because of its incompatibility with some of the very features that have characterized the Renaissance as a distinctive cultural configuration and revolution, including the rise of the humanism, the emergence of the individual, the emancipation of the artist, and the return to classical antiquity.Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy; and with evidence that heraldry as we know it today was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture. This was tied to the construction of the very concept of the Middle Ages. Our point of entry into the subject is a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). We approach the subject also from one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where Boiardo was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty. Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its Renaissance reception are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a whole gamut of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The wor

Heraldry is a well-defined and, almost by definition, narrow subject; a “feudal language,” with codified rules, attributes, and a history that has been told many times. Originating in medieval Europe around the invention of full-body armor, the culture of jousting and tournaments, notions of heredity, strong corporate institutions, and the practice of genealogy, it was common throughout the so-called ancien régime. Its fortunes are widely thought to have declined in the Italian Renaissance because of its incompatibility with some of the very features that have characterized the Renaissance as a distinctive cultural configuration and revolution, including the rise of the humanism, the emergence of the individual, the emancipation of the artist, and the return to classical antiquity.Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy; and with evidence that heraldry as we know it today was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture. This was tied to the construction of the very concept of the Middle Ages. Our point of entry into the subject is a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). We approach the subject also from one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where Boiardo was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty. Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its Renaissance reception are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a whole gamut of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The wor

The following reading of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova (1744) employs a Machiavellian lens to illustrate how issues preventing political longevity and encouraging ever-proliferating contingencies are overcome epistemologically, not through atemporal Cartesian reason, but rather through a layered, trans-historical hermeneutics. Because Vico frequently references (both tacitly and explicitly) Niccolò Machiavelli and because the two thinkers have a common grounding in humanist studies, particularly in rhetoric, the present discussion will explore the ways in which they share a distinct worldview that defines history as the epistemological experience of the individual and places concerns for proper governance at its core.A triadic interpretive schema will parse through three major thematic threads common to both Machiavellian and Vichean thought—advice; the individual; and communal laws—in order to analyze their three corresponding modes of argumentation—the visual, the metaphorical/poetical, and the legal—that are essential to substantiate the affinities and novelty of these two thinkers’ practical philosophies. The Introduction will discuss Machiavelli and Vico’s similar peripheral location with respect to modernity as a means to establish the basis for their comparison. Specifically, the Introduction will explain why Machiavelli’s writings deepen comprehension of the Scienza nuova and the claim Vico puts forth within it of its innovation from his pro-Descartes contemporaries.Chapter One, entitled “Allegorical Thinking and the Problem of Contingency,” will confront the difficulty of securing universally applicable praxes, as typified by the slippery counsel in Machiavelli’s Principe, and will analyze how Vico proposes a solution through the Scienza’s frontispiece. By foregrounding the rhetorical and interpretative techniques that enable allegory to link two levels of meaning—surface and hidden, poetical and philosophical—Chapter One will show how the Machiavellian

The following reading of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nuova (1744) employs a Machiavellian lens to illustrate how issues preventing political longevity and encouraging ever-proliferating contingencies are overcome epistemologically, not through atemporal Cartesian reason, but rather through a layered, trans-historical hermeneutics. Because Vico frequently references (both tacitly and explicitly) Niccolò Machiavelli and because the two thinkers have a common grounding in humanist studies, particularly in rhetoric, the present discussion will explore the ways in which they share a distinct worldview that defines history as the epistemological experience of the individual and places concerns for proper governance at its core.A triadic interpretive schema will parse through three major thematic threads common to both Machiavellian and Vichean thought—advice; the individual; and communal laws—in order to analyze their three corresponding modes of argumentation—the visual, the metaphorical/poetical, and the legal—that are essential to substantiate the affinities and novelty of these two thinkers’ practical philosophies. The Introduction will discuss Machiavelli and Vico’s similar peripheral location with respect to modernity as a means to establish the basis for their comparison. Specifically, the Introduction will explain why Machiavelli’s writings deepen comprehension of the Scienza nuova and the claim Vico puts forth within it of its innovation from his pro-Descartes contemporaries.Chapter One, entitled “Allegorical Thinking and the Problem of Contingency,” will confront the difficulty of securing universally applicable praxes, as typified by the slippery counsel in Machiavelli’s Principe, and will analyze how Vico proposes a solution through the Scienza’s frontispiece. By foregrounding the rhetorical and interpretative techniques that enable allegory to link two levels of meaning—surface and hidden, poetical and philosophical—Chapter One will show how the Machiavellian

Authorizing the Reader: Dante and the Ends of the Decameronby Natalie Ann Cleaver Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Albert Ascoli, ChairWe now speak easily of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch as the tre corone of Italian literature, the three great foundational authors of the tradition, but there is no question who stands first among them. Not just for his historical primacy of place, or his commanding self–presentation, but also for his truly daunting range of influence, Dante Alighieri is the Italian poet with whom all others must reckon. He influenced the development of virtually every aspect of Italian culture, from literature and the Italian language itself, to theology, political philosophy, historical memory, and even constructions of national identity. Though this influence has been long–lasting, it was every bit as pervasive in his own age.Few felt Dante’s shadow more than Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the first in subsequent generations of writers in the vernacular who had to negotiate his relationship to his illustrious predecessor. Boccaccio was a great Dantista in his own right; in addition to giving the first set of public lectures on the Commedia, he also composed the Trattatello in laude di Dante, in which he is the first to apply the epithet divina to the Commedia. Boccaccio obviously respected and admired Dante as a poet deeply. His minor works in particular demonstrate a profound engagement with the Commedia, and this relationship has been the subject of much recent scholarship.The most puzzling case of Boccaccio’s debts to Dante is his own great vernacular masterpiece: the Decameron. On the one hand, the Decameron signals its relationship to the Commedia in some very obvious ways: the structure of the 100 stories, its title, and the appearance of many of the same characters who populate the Commedia. On the other, past these obvious signs, the relationship begins t

Authorizing the Reader: Dante and the Ends of the Decameronby Natalie Ann Cleaver Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Albert Ascoli, ChairWe now speak easily of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch as the tre corone of Italian literature, the three great foundational authors of the tradition, but there is no question who stands first among them. Not just for his historical primacy of place, or his commanding self–presentation, but also for his truly daunting range of influence, Dante Alighieri is the Italian poet with whom all others must reckon. He influenced the development of virtually every aspect of Italian culture, from literature and the Italian language itself, to theology, political philosophy, historical memory, and even constructions of national identity. Though this influence has been long–lasting, it was every bit as pervasive in his own age.Few felt Dante’s shadow more than Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the first in subsequent generations of writers in the vernacular who had to negotiate his relationship to his illustrious predecessor. Boccaccio was a great Dantista in his own right; in addition to giving the first set of public lectures on the Commedia, he also composed the Trattatello in laude di Dante, in which he is the first to apply the epithet divina to the Commedia. Boccaccio obviously respected and admired Dante as a poet deeply. His minor works in particular demonstrate a profound engagement with the Commedia, and this relationship has been the subject of much recent scholarship.The most puzzling case of Boccaccio’s debts to Dante is his own great vernacular masterpiece: the Decameron. On the one hand, the Decameron signals its relationship to the Commedia in some very obvious ways: the structure of the 100 stories, its title, and the appearance of many of the same characters who populate the Commedia. On the other, past these obvious signs, the relationship begins t