ABSTRACT
Maylender’s monumental undertaking provided a stimulus and factual basis for the further study of academies. To date, these have tended, for obvious practical reasons, to focus on individual academies, or else on discrete cities and regions. Especially from the later twentieth century, a number of the best-known academies — some of which are still in existence or have been revived under different names — have attracted important critical studies, such as the Crusca and Fiorentina in Florence, the Accademia della Fama and the Incogniti in Venice, the Ricovrati-Galileana in Padua, the Intronati in Siena and the Oziosi in Naples.3 On the broader phenomenon some excellent survey essays and collected volumes have also appeared.4 Histories of Italian literature and culture have continued to include some mention of the academies in general, ref lecting the significance attributed to these societies in the monumental study of the eighteenth-century erudito Girolamo Tiraboschi.5 However, until recently many of the negative prejudices subsequently
presented in Francesco De Sanctis’s colourful description of academic preciosity, futility and artificial self-aggrandizement have coloured the way in which these institutions were perceived:
Even fairly recent sympathetic and multi-dimensional treatments of academies which have taken account of their wide-ranging activities across the arts and sciences, such as that of Amedeo Quondam, were still largely obliged to draw on the data collected by Maylender, and have also still tended to privilege discussion of the larger and better known academies. Though Quondam’s substantial essay seriously attempts to study and quantify the whole phenomenon, inevitably in the space available, in many cases he can only raise questions which need to be pursued and investigated in more detail, for example regarding institutional make-up and names, cultural aims, and literary and scientific pursuits.
