In the next seven minutes, I would like to convince you that real formalism and real historicism really are, or really should be, one and the same critical practice. Our idea of what counts as knowledge about early English literature will be enriched by integrating formalist and historicist methods. Those of us who work on prosody and poetics are…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Critical introduction by Molly M. Martin. Edited and translated by Molly M. Martin and Paola Ugolini. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014

This entry explores paradoxes from their origin in classical antiquity to their dissemination in the Renaissance, defining the nature of paradoxes and attempting to explain the reason for their success in the Renaissance.

Satire, in both prose and verse, was a relevant form of expression in the Renaissance. The development of Renaissance satire was influenced by the new vogue for the classics that brought back to fame satirists such as Horace and Juvenal. During the Renaissance satiric works were written in neo-Latin and in the vernaculars, and both in prose and in…[Read more]

L’articolo analizza la rappresentazione della donna nel Rinascimento attraverso le Novelle di Matteo Bandello che trattano del tema dell’adulterio.

Abstract: This article analyzes the oration Che la Corte è vera scuola non solamente della prudenza, ma delle virtù morali (1624), delivered at the Accademia degli Umoristi by Agostino Mascardi, a courtier, professor of rhetoric, and renowned member of academies. Mascardi’s oration has traditionally been read as a commendation of the court, and…[Read more]

The Purgatorio delle Cortigiane is an anti-courtesan satire known for having been performed during carnival festivities by its author, the painter Maestro Andrea, while he was disguised as a beggar. Renaissance courtesans were a common victim of satirical texts because their fast upward social mobility rendered them an easy target for the male…[Read more]