Sparks and Seeds

John Freccero is internationally renowned for his scholarship on Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and other authors. Currently Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at New York University, he has also taught at Yale, Stanford, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. His numerous honors include Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and awards from the city of Florence and the Republic of Italy.

Despite the diverse expertise of their authors (fairly evenly divided between Italianists and scholars of English and Comparative Literature), all of the articles included in the volume appertain to Italian literature - from a literary analysis of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium to tracing the State of Maryland’s medieval Italian motto back through its English Renaissance sources. Many of the pieces are concerned with Dante directly, and several others dealing with medieval and Renaissance Italian subjects do so indirectly. Two articles are concerned with pre-modern cultural and literary implications of the history of science; the remainder trace the afterlife of medieval or Renaissance Italian motifs in modern culture. Despite the fact that the articles range from medieval scholasticism to twentieth-century cinema, this volume addresses applications of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, influenced, above all, by the teaching and scholarship of John Freccero.