Jaeger’s Medieval Humanism Now Published

Italica Press is pleased to announce the publication of C. Stephen Jaeger’s Medieval Humanism: Collected Essays.

In this volume Jaeger argues that a synthesis of culture from 950 to 1150 emerges from the humanism of the early cathedral schools that proliferated from the second half of the tenth century and from the educational innovations closely tied to the rule of Emperor Otto I, the Great. Its thought and teaching takes its character from the fusion of ancient Roman philosophy and ethical ideals with Christian teachings. Its influence in church and imperial administration is as profound as it is in philosophy, literary style, and social mores. A humanist educated class emerges from these schools that reaches deep into clerical, monastic, and worldly spheres.

These collected essays, some published here for the first time, summarize the past fifty years of Jaeger’s work and thought. Its introduction, revisions, and updates also incorporate other scholars’ research over the past half-century, remove the archival character of standard “collected essays,” and produce a fresh view of a new reinvisioning of European cultural history. These chapters also speak to our own age of rapidly changing cultural and educational values.

Preface, introduction, comprehensive bibliography, notes, index. 510 pages.

This is the latest volume in Italica’s series Studies in Art and History.

Pascoli’s Tamarisks Published

Italica Press is happy to announce the publication of Giovanni Pascoli's Tamarisks, translated by Piero Garofalo. 

Tamarisks (Myricae) is Giovanni Pascoli’s first major collection of verse. Many of its poems center on manifestations of the rural. Nature is at once an interpretation and interpolation of humanity. These compositions explore the countryside, experience the seasons and their alternation, relate the rhythms of agrarian labor, seek the blooming flower, spy the secluded nest. The collection draws on everyday objects, the changing landscape, the Anthropocene, the disenfranchised, and the natural world to explore humanity’s relationship to nature and to the modern world. 

Tamarisks is a liminal text, rooted in the classical lyrical tradition. It heralded the innovations and experimentation of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. In breaking with the past and articulating a new poetic language, it is a foundational statement for modern Italian poetry. Tamarisks’ poems and sections develop an internal dialogue that reflects the mediation between the poetic voice and external reality. Pascoli’s poetry is a single vast meditation that explores possibilities by engaging in diverse poetic strategies contemporaneously. The lowly tamarisk, at once humble and noble, is always poetry.

This publication joins Italica Press’s already published translation of Pascoli’s Convivial Poems.

Introduction, bibliography, first-line index, and notes, 330 pages.

New Reviews

We’ve recently had reviews of two of our titles that we’ve found especially interesting.

The first is Lorenzo Miletti’s review in Latomus of Rabun Taylor’s Ancient Naples: A Documentary History. Origins to c. 350 CE. He has high praise for the most recently published volume in our Documentary History of Naples series. Miletti lauds Taylor’s research and the scope of his coverage, his command of the written sources and of the most recent archaeological findings, and his ability to synthesize and interpret these for a broad audience of both specialists and more general readers. The review notes the volume’s up-to-date appeal for both an Anglophone and a wider Italian and international audience. Miletti concludes his review with some suggestions for a larger format, color-illustrated edition. Stay tuned.…

The second is Norman Jope’s piece in the latest Tears in the Fence on Ana Ilievska’s and Pietro Russo’s Contemporary Sicilian Poetry: A Multilingual Anthology. Jope has many very good things to say about the volume, its selection of authors and poems, and Ana Ilievska’s translations. He also raises the question of whether such a collection should reflect the universal themes raised by this wide array of authors — and foregrounded by the editors — or focus more closely on specific times, places, and contexts. These are interesting reflections, from a decidedly Anglophone perspective. 

Please have a look at both reviews.

View a YouTube Video on The Priest’s Hat

View a YouTube video by translator Steve Eaton on Verbal Exchange, “The Priest’s Hat: The Story Behind Italy's First Crime Novel,”  

Steve discusses the novel and author, the actual historical event on which De Marchi based this novel, and the sensational reaction of Italian society to this murder. Please have a look at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pXAXDS-LxU

New Reviews of Pascoli’s Convivial Poems

Elena Borelli & James Ackhurst’s new translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Convivial Poems has gotten quite a lot of good critical attention this season, with reviews in Reading in Translation, London Grip, Gradiva, and Annali d’Italianistica.

Please have a look at: http://www.italicapress.com/index556.html