Italica Press Catalog 50

We’re very proud to announce the publication our Fiftieth Italica Press Catalog. Since our founding in 1985, we’ve been publishing our catalog in various forms: first as a two-fold pamphlet, then as a small — and then large — booklet sent via direct mail and in recent years as a downloadable PDF document, in full color with complete details of titles, formats and prices.

In this catalog we announce one new title, the English-language edition of Sandra C. Malicote and A. Richard Hartman’s Aiol: A Chanson de Geste. This edition is derived from the editors’ dual-language edition from the Old French and is ideal for the general reader and the undergraduate student. It contains eleven illustrations from the original manuscript, an introduction, notes, a selection of the Old French text and a bibliography.

Readers will also be interested in a forthcoming title, Coriolano Cippico’s The Deeds of Commander Pietro Mocenigo, written in 1474/75 and newly translated and edited by Kiril Petkov. The Deeds is an excellent example of Renaissance historiography put into the service of the Venetian Republic. It describes the conflict between Venice and the Ottoman Turks in graphic terms, revealing the political, military and diplomatic realities behind the crusading rhetoric and classicizing style of this long-overlooked humanist text.

Aiol, A Chanson de Geste, Published

Italica Press is happy to announce the publication of Aiol: A Chanson de Geste, Modern Edition and First English translation by Sandra C. Malicote and A. Richard Hartman.

This chanson de geste records the exploits of the young knight, Aiol, as he reclaims by word and deed his father’s and mother’s unjustly stolen heritage. He gains the love of a Saracen princess who converts when she is convinced of the truth of the Christian god by Aiol’s warrior’s prowess. He then aids the French King Louis in ending a debilitating war led by rebellious vassals and (in an allusion to the Fourth Crusade) similarly helps Emperor Grasien, the king of Venice, to end his own war against an enemy to the East. Aiol’s deeds ultimately bring justice to the kingdom of France.

Hartman and Malicote’s edition and translation is based on manuscript BNFfr 25516 and on the critical editions of W. Foerster and of J. Normand and G. Raynaud. As with their edition of Elye of Saint Gilles, the editors have chosen simplicity and directness of approach. The translation remains faithful to the spirit and meaning of the Old French poem; creating a lively, interesting and engaging text that allows the reader to savor the rich intellectual and artistic context of the original.

This title presents both the original Old French with facing English verse translation. It is now available in both hardcover and paperback. A Kindle version will be ready soon.

Petrarch’s Two Gardens Published

Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement by William Tronzo has just been published. The four essays that make up this book take as their subject gardens of the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose traces are still visible, in varying degrees, at sites in Italy and France: Palermo and Rome, the Vaucluse and Hesdin. Traces only, as these gardens have long since been emptied of the life whose insistent motion gave them shape and in the intervening years have been transformed in such a way as to entangle and obscure significant moments of their past.

The landscape it seeks to narrate, in four discrete episodes, stands not alone, as an independent and integral creation, but as an installation within a more enduring environment in much the same way that temporary “ambient architecture” — the architecture of the stage set, the showroom and the festival — stands within the framework of building and city.

This new book is the second in a collaboration with Professor Tronzo, after  Medieval Naples: An Architectural and Urban History, 400–1400 (with Caroline Bruzelius) and is the latest volume in our continuing series, Studies in Art and History. It is the winner of the 2012 David R. Coffin Publication Grant of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. 

Petrarch’s Two Gardens is also the first title in which Italica Press has published full color art — to wonderful effect. This title is available now in hardcover and paperback, and will soon be published in a Kindle edition.

We are also happy to announce that our Catalog 49 is now available for download or viewing on screen.

New Fall Titles

This Fall Italica Press will publish three new titles in its Literature series: one in Medieval & Renaissance Texts (and Poetry in Translation) and two in our now expanding Renaissance & Modern Plays series.

Aiol: A Chanson de Geste records the exploits of the young knight, Aiol, as he reclaims by word and deed his father’s and mother’s unjustly stolen heritage. He gains the love of a Saracen princess who converts when she is convinced of the truth of the Christian god by Aiol’s warrior’s prowess. He then aids the French King Louis in ending a debilitating war led by rebellious vassals and (in an allusion to the Fourth Crusade) similarly helps Emperor Grasien, the king of Venice, to end his own war against an enemy to the East. Aiol’s deeds ultimately bring justice to the kingdom of France.
But the poem is far more than the tale itself. Aiol, like many other crusading and romance epics, artfully recreates both the Christian culture of the West and the Islamic culture of the Levant. 

Modern Edition and First English Translation by Sandra C. Malicote & A. Richard Hartman. Dual-Language Poetry. Introduction, notes, bibliography, and all 11 illustrations from the original Paris MS.

In Watching the Moon and Other Plays Patricia Gaborik presents an extensive introduction on the thought and legacy of Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) and complete translations of three of his major plays: Watching the Moon (1916), Stormcloud (1935) and Cinderella (1942). 
Bontempelli, poet, novelist, playwright and composer would become one of the literary giants of the 20th century. The father of magic realism in Italy, he was associated with the futurist avant-garde and then launched his own influential literary movement, Novecento. Editor and creator of various journals, he collaborated with some of the greatest writers of his day, from James Joyce to Luigi Pirandello. Bontempelli was a prominent fascist intellectual and remained a controversial writer. In 1953, however, he was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award.
1st English translation. Introduction, notes,  bibliography, illustrated.

In Six Characters in Search of an Author  Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt present, for the first time together, and many for the first time in English, the writings that formed the genesis of Luigi Pirandello’s  Six Characters in Search of an Author, along with a new translation of the theater masterpiece itself.
The interaction between characters demanding to “live” in writing and an author who rejects them would be developed in Pirandello’s 1911 story “The Tragedy of a Character.” In 1925, Pirandello conceived the idea of writing a novel about an author who rejects the characters who come to him begging to be put into a novel, and in a July 1917 letter to his son, he gives the novel a title: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore: Romanzo da fare (Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Novel to Be Made). Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt provide all these materials for a complete appreciation of this masterwork.
New English translation. Introduction, notes, bibliography.

Our Latest Catalog

Our latest catalog, no. 48, for Summer 2013, is now available for downloading or viewing online. We’ve revised it for easier viewing of all publication formats. It offers our complete title list, arranged by series, in all print and digital versions, with full descriptions and pricing information. This summer we’re offering three new titles.

To have a look, please click here or visit our Italica Press Home Page and follow the Download Complete Catalog link.