3) Johannes of Hauvilla’s Architrenius and Giacomo Leopardi’s Dialogue of Nature with an Icelander

What can Architrenius by Johannes of Hauvilla, an obscure poem in Latin hexameters from 1184 Northern France, classified by modern editors as a “satyrical allegory,” have in common with one of the most famous and characteristic prose works of the Italian nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, his Dialogue of Nature with an Icelander? The latter is considered the main expression of Leopardi’s original anti-providentialistic, anti-anthropocentric, anti-Christian—if not plainly materialistic ...