An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context

by Lauro Martines, Murtha Baca (Translator)

This unique collection offers six tales as enticing views into the history of Renaissance Italy, with fiction and fictional modes thus becoming gateways to a real, historical world. All written between 1400 and 1500-- among them a rare gem by Lorenzo the Magnificent and a famous account featuring Filippo Brunelleschi-- the six stories are presented here in new and lively translations. As engrossing, fresh, and high-spirited as those in Boccaccio's "Decameron", the tales deal with marriage, deception, rural manners, gender relations, social ambitions, adultery, homosexuality, and the demands of individual identity. Each is accompanied by an essay, in which Lauro Martines situates the story in its temporal context, transforming it into an outright historical document. The stories and essays focus mainly on people from the ordinary and middling ranks of society, as they go about the daily give-and-take of city life, under the pressure of a highly practical, conformist, pleasure-loving (but often cruel) urban society. "An Italian Renaissance Sextet" reveals the concerns of a searching historical work with a combined anthropological, demographic, and cultural slant; what emerges is a fascinating range of gender, age, sexuality, blasphemy, forms of social address, and, above all, the invasive gaze of a community that kept an ever vigilant eye on its public spaces.

Genres: History, Italy

284 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Lauro Martines , former Professor of European History at the University of California, Los Angeles, is renowned for his books on the Italian Renaissance. The author of Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, and most recently of Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance, he reviews for The Times Literary Supplement and lives in London with his wife, novelist Julia O'Faolain.

Reviews

[Petruccio Hambasket IV · Rating 3 out of 5]

The historian as closely scrutinizing literary critic: a fresh academic approach that will probably be popping up more and more as the years go by. The 6 tales themselves are (for the most part) boring and didactic in that unique Renaissance way, especially since Martines' whole point is that they can be broken down to explain things about the time period. Read 'em if you wanna learn something about Renaissance culture but don't have the patience for a large, purely historical, study. If you don't think fiction has the capability to give insight into historical life at all you probably won't be having a fun time with this (and you're at least a little wrong).

[Laura]

read for my Early Renaissance art history course fall 2021