This important new book considers many of the ways in which national identity was imagined, implemented and contested within Italian culture before, during and after the period of Italian unification in the mid-nineteenth century. Taking a fresh approach towards national icons cherished by both Left and Right, the collection's authors examine the complex interaction between a perceived need for national identity and the fragmented nature of the Italian peninsula. In so doing, they draw on examples from a wide range of artistic and cultural media.
The book opens with an introduction which defines the case of the Italian 'Risorgimento' and places it within a large context of European and global nation-building and nationalism. Authors discuss how episodes from the distant past were used by nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, musicians, and writers to recreate narratives of nationhood, as well as how the problem of Italian identity was before and during the Risorgimento. The question of who belonged in the new Italy, who remained outsiders, and how social and sexual differences entered into defining these groups is also addressed. The book concludes with an analysis of twentieth-century attempts to appropriate and reforge the 'spirit' of the Risorgimento, under Fascism and in our own time.

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74), best known for his influential collection of Italian lyric poetry dedicated to his beloved Laura, was also a remarkable classical scholar, a deeply religious thinker and a philosopher of secular ethics. In this wide-ranging study, chapters by leading scholars view Petrarch's life through his works, from the epic Africa to the Letter to Posterity, from the Canzoniere to the vernacular epic Triumphi. Petrarch is revealed as the heir to the converging influences of classical cultural and medieval Christianity, but also to his great vernacular precursor, Dante, and his friend, collaborator and sly critic, Boccaccio. Particular attention is given to Petrach's profound influence on the Humanist movement and on the courtly cult of vernacular love poetry, while raising important questions as to the validity of the distinction between medieval and modern and what is lost in attempting to classify this elusive figure.

Focusing on major authors and problems from the Italian fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Machiavelli, Ariosto and Tasso, A Local Habitation and a Name examines the unstable dialectic of "reality" and "imagination," as well as of "history" and "literature." Albert Ascoli identifies and interprets the ways in which literary texts are shaped by and serve the purposes of multiple, intertwined historical discourses and circumstances, and he equally probes the function of such texts in constructing, interpreting, critiquing, and effacing the histories in which they are embedded. Throughout, he poses the theoretical and methodological question of how formal analysis and literary forms can at once resist and further the historicist enterprise. Along the way Ascoli interrogates the mechanisms of historical periodization that have governed for so long our study of what is sometimes called the "Renaissance," sometimes the early modern period. He also addresses the period's own unstable version of the literature/history opposition, the place of gendered discourse in the construction of historical narratives (and vice versa), the elaborate formal strategies by which poets and intellectuals negotiate their relations to power, and, finally, the way in which proper names (of authors, works, and exemplary characters) serve as points of negotiation between individual identity and social order in the Renaissance. The book brings to culmination two decades of a major scholar's thinking about some of the most important figures and questions that shaped the Renaissance, with emphasis on the question of history, both the historical context of literature and the writing of literary history.

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74), best known for his influential collection of Italian lyric poetry dedicated to his beloved Laura, was also a remarkable classical scholar, a deeply religious thinker and a philosopher of secular ethics. In this wide-ranging study, chapters by leading scholars view Petrarch's life through his works, from the epic Africa to the Letter to Posterity, from the Canzoniere to the vernacular epic Triumphi. Petrarch is revealed as the heir to the converging influences of classical cultural and medieval Christianity, but also to his great vernacular precursor, Dante, and his friend, collaborator and sly critic, Boccaccio. Particular attention is given to Petrach's profound influence on the Humanist movement and on the courtly cult of vernacular love poetry, while raising important questions as to the validity of the distinction between medieval and modern and what is lost in attempting to classify this elusive figure.

Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri - minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet - into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

FINALIST--2008 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE
In "The Essential Writings of Machiavelli," Peter Constantine has assembled a comprehensive collection that shows the true depth and breadth of a great Renaissance thinker. Refreshingly accessible, these superb new translations are faithful to Machiavelli's original, beautifully crafted writings.
The volume features essays that appear in English for the first time, such as "A Caution to the Medici" and "The Persecution of Africa." Also included are complete versions of the political treatise, "The Prince," the comic satire "The Mandrake," "The Life of Castruccio Castracani," and the classic story "Belfagor," along with selections from "The Discourses, The Art of War," and "Florentine Histories," Augmented with useful features-vital and concise annotations and cross-references-this unique compendium is certain to become the standard one-volume reference to this influential, versatile, and ever timely writer.
"Machiavelli's stress on political necessity rather than moral perfection helped inspire the Renaissance by renewing links with Thucydides and other classical thinkers. This new collection provides deeper insight into Machiavelli's personality as a writer, thus broadening our understanding of him."
-Robert D. Kaplan, author of W"arrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos"
"Constantine's selection is not only intelligent; his translations are astonishingly good. Thoughtfully introduced by Albert Russell Ascoli, this edition belongs in everyone's library."
-John Jeffries Martin, professor and chair, department of history, Trinity University
"If one were to assign a single edition of Machiavelli's works, thismost certainly would be it."
-John P. McCormick, professor, department of political science, University of Chicago

Focusing on the fundamental Ariostan pairing of education and madness, with all its implications for poetry, Professor Ascoli generates a global reading of the greatest literary work of the Italian Renaissance Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The first modern treatise of political philosophy, "The Prince" remains one of the world's most influential and widely read books. Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with expedient exercises of will, reveals nothing less than the secrets of power: how to gain it, how to wield it, and how to keep it. But curiously, this work of outspoken clarity has, for centuries, inspired myriad interpretations as to its author's true message.
The Introduction by noted Italian Renaissance scholar Albert Russell Ascoli provides a perfect opening to Peter Constantine's illuminating new translation of this seminal work.
"Constantine elegantly captures in English the pith of Machiavelli's brilliant Italian prose."
-Edward Muir, Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University
"Peter Constantine's excellent translation belongs in everyone's library. Perhaps now more than ever we have much to learn from this Renaissance thinker, present at the birth of the modern world."
-John Jeffries Martin, professor of history, Duke University

Focusing on the fundamental Ariostan pairing of education and madness, with all its implications for poetry, Professor Ascoli generates a global reading of the greatest literary work of the Italian Renaissance

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This important new book considers many of the ways in which national identity was imagined, implemented and contested within Italian culture before, during and after the period of Italian unification in the mid-nineteenth century. Taking a fresh approach towards national icons cherished by both Left and Right, the collection's authors examine the complex interaction between a perceived need for national identity and the fragmented nature of the Italian peninsula. In so doing, they draw on examples from a wide range of artistic and cultural media.
The book opens with an introduction which defines the case of the Italian 'Risorgimento' and places it within a large context of European and global nation-building and nationalism. Authors discuss how episodes from the distant past were used by nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, musicians, and writers to recreate narratives of nationhood, as well as how the problem of Italian identity was before and during the Risorgimento. The question of who belonged in the new Italy, who remained outsiders, and how social and sexual differences entered into defining these groups is also addressed. The book concludes with an analysis of twentieth-century attempts to appropriate and reforge the 'spirit' of the Risorgimento, under Fascism and in our own time.