The I Tatti Renaissance Library

I am delighted to announce, on behalf of Harvard University Press and Harvard's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (the "Villa I Tatti"), the launch of a new dual-language text series that is going to revolutionize the field of Renaissance studies. Modeled on the Loeb Classical Library, The I Tatti Renaissance Library aims to make available to a broad readership the most significant literary, historical, and philosophical works of the Italian Renaissance written in Latin. The Latin works of Italian humanists and thinkers from Petrarch to Giordano Bruno constitute a major literary tradition, but one that has become a kind of Atlantis or lost continent, sunken between the two great continents of classical literature and the modern vernacular literatures. Yet for over two centuries the finest writers and intellectuals of Renaissance Italy devoted themselves to restoring and emulating the literary traditions of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Thousands of writers composed tens of thousands of works in Renaissance Latin, including many works of genius--a coruscating display of literary, historical, and philosophical talent that also provides a key to understanding the world of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other great artists of the Renaissance. The goal of the I Tatti series is to raise this lost continent of literature to the surface once more and allow students and scholars to explore its hidden treasures.

The first three volumes, beautifully produced by Harvard University Press, are a good sample of the riches afforded by the literature of Italian Renaissance humanism. Boccaccio"s Famous Women is the first biographical collection devoted exclusively to women, and a source for later literary treatments of women"s lives. Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People is generally considered the first work of modern history, the work that invented the concept of the "Middle Ages." And Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Theology is the most important philosophical work to emerge from the great Renaissance project to revive the soul-philosophy of Plato. Together with the other forthcoming volumes in the series they will change fundamentally the way that the Renaissance is taught and understood. These volumes will provide inexpensive, reliable editions and translations that make it possible to teach courses on Renaissance culture in innovative ways to new generations of students who may not have the foundation in classical languages that previous generations enjoyed. They will make it possible for general readers, for the first time, to acquire a sense of what the high literary culture of the Renaissance was all about, and to enrich their understanding of the artistic life of this most creative period of Western culture.