Virtual Humanities Lab – New Texts

• Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica (1322-48). The Nuova Cronica covers Florentine history from biblical and legendary origins to 1348 (the year of the Great Plague and the year in which Boccaccio’s Decameron was conceived as a book) and represents a fundamental primary source for our understanding of 13th- and 14th-century Florentine history.
• Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante(1373-74). The Esposizioni (left unfinished by Boccaccio at his death in 1375) is a learned commentary on Dante Alighieri’s Comedy, a series of written lectures (some of which were delivered by Boccaccio in the Church of Santo Stefano della Badìa in Florence, between October 23, 1373 and the beginning of the following year) and provides an extraordinary window onto the intellectual workshop of Boccaccio the humanist, within the civic context of 14th-century vernacular Florentine culture;
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones Nongentae Disputandae (1486). Considered to be the philosophical Manifesto of a full-fledged Renaissance humanism, Pico’s Oration on Human Dignity was actually conceived by Pico as a prolusion or introduction to his “900 Theses” (Conclusiones Nongentae), Pico's extraordinary synthesis and “reconciliation” of all known philosophical and theological ideas. The Conclusiones were first published by Eucharius Silber in Rome on 7 December, 1486. The 24-year-old Pico planned to publicly "defend" his theses in Rome, in January 1487, before a commission of cardinals and theologians appointed by Pope Innocent VIII.

  These exemplary texts of 14th- and 15th-century culture, belonging to different rhetorical genres (commentaries, chronicles, sermons and philosophical treatises) aptly represent the articulation and power of written discourse at two crucial stages in the development of Italian and Latin humanism, against the historical backdrop of the transition from the Florentine Republic to the Signoria. None of these texts is available in a critical electronic edition. Neither Boccaccio’s Esposizioni nor Villani’s Cronica are available in a complete English translation. Our final goal is to make these textual resources available online, both in the original Italian and Latin (as is the case of Pico) and in English translation, in a searchable format alongside the Boccaccean mini-corpus already available on the Decameron Web site. We also intend to study the best way to link them to other resources such as the existing databases of archival information about the social and economic structures of 14th-and 15th-century Florence (the Catasto and Tratte).