Catalog 59 Now Online

Our Italica Press Catalog 59, for Summer 2021, is now available and ready for download. It contains eleven new and recently published titles, plus our complete backlist.

As we emerge from an extended year of Covid lockdowns, this new season offers a rich selection of medieval and Renaissance texts, history, and modern Italian fiction. We’ve also now completed two ongoing series and have launched a new one.

We are pleased to announce the publication of several important new medieval and Renaissance titles. The first, a new volume in our Studies in Art & History, is Irving Lavin’s The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance, his Slade Lectures at Oxford, newly edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.

Catherine M. Jones and William W. Kibler offer the first modern English translation of Huon of Bordeaux, a perennial favorite since its first appearance in the thirteenth century as a French chanson de geste. 

We are also very pleased to present James A. Palmer’s first complete English translation of The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman: Rome, Italy, and Latin Christendom, c.1325–1360. Available previously only in partial versions focusing on Cola di Rienzo, the Anonimo Romano’s work is now published in its entirety with introduction, notes, index, and bibliography.

The next two volumes in our Documentary History of Naples complete that series. Rabun M. Taylor presents Ancient Naples: A Documentary History: Origins to c.350 CE, the first comprehensive survey of ancient Naples in the English language, tracing the history of the city from its origins into late antiquity. 

Charlotte Nichols & James H. Mc Gregor’s Renaissance Naples: A Documentary History, 1400–1600 offers the first English-language collection of sources to treat the city of Naples from the end of the medieval into the early modern period.

Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn have completed the first English translation of The Sermons and Liturgy of Saint James: Book I of the Liber Sancti Jacobi. This is the fifth and final of a series publishing modern English translations of and commentary on the Codex Calixtinus in our Compostela Project.

Kiril Petkov brings us another important Mediterranean text with his From Cyprus to Lepanto, an annotated translation of the History of Giovanni Pietro Contarini on the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and its contexts. 

Finally, we’ve published four new titles in our Modern Italian Fiction series. The first is New Italian Voices, translated and edited by Cinzia Sartini Blum and Deborah L. Contrada. This major new collection includes accomplished, award-winning Italian writers from India and Syria, Eastern Europe, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Italy.

Ivy, by Nobel Prize winning novelist Grazia Deledda, has been translated from the Italian, with introduction, by Mary Ann Frese Witt and Martha Witt. It is part of our ongoing project to publish Deledda’s corpus.

The next two works are part of our new series of Italian Crime Writers. The first is Agony, the first English-language translation, by Andrew Edwards, of Federico De Roberto’s Spasimo, a psychological-detective novel set in 19th-century Lausanne. De Roberto, a master of verismo, is celebrated today for his acute political, social, and psychological insights. 

The second moves to the closing days of World War II in Sicily with A Conspiracy of Talkers by Gaetano Savatteri, translated by Steve Eaton. American Lieutenant Benjamin Adano investigates some missing U.S. Army trucks, while the Carabinieri craft a conspiracy to implicate an innocent man for a mayor’s murder and to protect the dead man’s enemies.