New Titles, Winter 2019

We’re happy to announce two new titles about to be published for this Winter season. The first is Renaissance Naples: A Documentary History, 1400–1600, edited by Charlotte Nichols and James H. Mc Gregor. This book offers the first comprehensive English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval to the early modern period. This book presents 169 readings in English translation drawn from historical, biographical, financial, literary, artistic, religious and cultural documents starting with the later Angevin dynasty and ending at the 17th century.

Its 558 pages present 169 readings, preface, introduction, notes and bibliography, appendices, including the Tavola Strozzi with key, Map of Renaissance Naples with thumbnail key, index. The volume contains also 86 b&w figures, plus 48 thumbnail views and links to online resources from A Documentary History of Naples, including image galleries with 417 additional images in full color.

Our second offering is Grazia Deledda’s Ivy, translated by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt. Many consider Ivy to be Deledda’s best work, surpassing even Elias Portolu and Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento). Here she deeply probes the misguided but altruistic motivation of a woman totally dependent on others who lack her own moral fortitude. 

Deledda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, writing fiction set in Sardinia, mining it deeply and evoking its people and their character. Ivy, Deledda’s third novel, was originally published in 1908 in Italian as L’Edera and has never been previously published in English.