Language and Learning in Renaissance Italy

Language was the Italian humanists’ stock-in-trade, rhetoric their core discipline. In this volume Professor Monfasani collects together his most important articles on these subjects. One group of these, including two review essays, focuses specifically on the humanist Lorenzo Valla and on his philosophy of language. The third section of the book opens out the coverage of Italian Renaissance cultural history and includes studies of several new texts - among them a description of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, and a call for press censorship - and of the religious culture of mid-15th-century Rome.