"A splendid collection. Fubini's studies offer a powerful and coherent account of Italian humanism from Petrarch to Valla. They make a strong case for the seriousness of humanism as an intellectual movement, rather than a simply literary or pedagogical one. They thus do us the important service of making our image of humanism at once more complex and more responsive to primary sources. . . . Fubini lays the basis for a whole new approach to humanist texts."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Riccardo Fubini is Professor of Renaissance History at the University of Florence. He is the author of Umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: Origini rinascimentali, critica moderna; Quattrocento fiorentino: Politica, diplomazia, cultura; and Italia quattrocentesca: Politica e dipolmazia nell’età di Lorenzo il Magnifico.

Martha King is the editor of New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction, translator of Grazia Deledda’s Reeds in the Wind and Elias Portulu, and cotranslator of Luigi Pirandello’s Her Husband, published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Consciousness of the Latin Language among Humanists: Did the Romans Speak Latin?
2. Humanist Intentions and Patristic References: Some Thoughts on the Moral Writings of the Humanists
3. Poggio Bracciolini and San Bernardino: The Themes and Motives of a Polemic
4. The Theater of the World in the Moral and Historical Thought of Poggio
5. An Analysis of Lorenzo Valla’s De Voluptate: His Sojourn in Pavia and the Composition of the Dialogue
Notes
Index