Reviews of New Titles

We’ve received two excellent reviews for recent titles. Renaissance Quarterly has called William Tronzo’s Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement “absorbing and transformative,” while The Medieval Review notes that in their edition of Aiol: A Chanson de Geste, Sandra C. Malicote and A. Richard Hartman “have provided a valuable resource for scholars and an inviting tale for devotees of medieval heroic literature.”

Please take a moment or two to read the full text of these reviews at the links above. 

New Fall Titles: the West and Islam

We’re happy to announce two new titles and one new Kindle edition for the Fall of 2014. All three titles offer interesting variations on the Western perceptions of Islam and the role of the Mediterranean as a bridge among the various cultures of the region. All three titles are available in hardcover, paperback and a variety of digital formats, including searchable PDF downloads and Kindle editions.

The first is Kiril Petkov’s edition and translation of The Deeds of Commander Pietro Mocenigo by Coriolano Cippico. From 1470 to 1474 Cippico served as galley captain in a Venetian naval expedition in the eastern Mediterranean under the command of the future doge of Venice, Pietro Mocenigo. He wrote The Deeds in 1474/75. In its three books he describes the exploits of the campaign as Mocenigo’s fleet engaged in a systematic depredation of the western Anatolian shoreline, helped suppress a political coup in Cyprus and seal the Venetian hold of the island, supported the Venetian diplomatic outreach to the lords of Karaman, the chief Ottoman adversaries in Anatolia, and provided crucial relief to the Venetian-held Albanian stronghold of Skodra (Scutari) besieged by Ottoman troops.

Composed in an elegant humanist Latin, The Deeds details a sophisticated eyewitness account of the Christian–Ottoman confrontation in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The brutality of war, the constant traffic in slaves and booty and the almost casual destruction of the ancient remains of Asia Minor form the backdrop to the expert diplomacy, crusade rhetoric, humanist discourse and the cultural claims of the Venetian Republic.

The present edition is the first translation of The Deeds into English and brings back to light one of the finest pieces of Renaissance history writing, often and widely reprinted and much appreciated in its time, but undeservedly forgotten until recently.

The second is Kevin R. Poole’s edition and translation of the Chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin, Book IV of the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Codex Calixtinus). This key manuscript also contains the Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela, the Miracles of St. James and the Veneranda dies sermon (all previously published by Italica Press), a collection of liturgical texts and other sermons associated with the cathedral and its saint, and a series of letters surrounding the fate of the body of St. James and its burial in Spain.

The twelfth-century Chronicle, also known as the History of Charlemagne and Roland, offers an “eye-witness” account of events during the late eighth century. Charlemagne’s compatriot, Archbishop Turpin of Rheims, describes the miraculous appearance of Saint James to Charlemagne and the battles against the Muslims that he and Roland fought in Iberia as a result of this vision. The chronicle is one of the fundamental texts in the literary legend surrounding Charlemagne, Roland, Compostela and St. James. It served as source material for a large number of other chronicles as well as for French chansons de geste and other forms of heroic literature, including the Song of Roland (also in a new edition from Italica Press).

In this first modern English translation of the chronicle, Kevin Poole investigates the issues of fiction, legend and authorship and the relationship between the false chronicle and its wider literary tradition. 

The third new offering is the Kindle edition of Aiol: A Chanson de Geste. Like many other crusading and romance epics, Aiol artfully recreates both the Christian culture of the West and the Islamic culture of the Levant. Poets writing in medieval French created richly textured literary metaphors or fictions about both the Christian and Muslim worlds, and they were themselves well aware that even though they were treating historically-based materials, they were also fabricating fictions and fictive truths, tropes and figures as literary art. 

As with their Italica Press edition of Elye of Saint Gilles, Sandra C. Malicote and A. Richard Hartman 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.

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.