ABSTRACT

For fifty years after the death of Francesco Petrarca and Boccaccio, Italian scholars continued to unearth the Latin past and, with the aid of such teachers of Greek as were available, to explore the largely unknown literature of Greece. The two Italian poets of the fifteenth century who worked on a large scale, and whose poems stood as examples to their greater successors in the age to come, were neither of them Florentines, nor were either close to any popular tradition of vernacular writing. Ariosto was a poet who wrote entirely from an artist's standpoint, without thought for philosophy or religion. Contemporary with Ariosto and with the wars of invasion which reduced Italy to an economically depressed battleground, whose princes became clients to one nation of barbarians or the other, to France or to Spain, two prose writers endeavoured to give the country a sense of her past, and of her national destiny.