ABSTRACT
It is well known that the dialogue enjoyed an extraordinary success during the Renaissance. Many studies, especially in the past few decades, have tried to describe this phenomenon and understand its roots. It is generally agreed that this literary genre was preferred to others because it reflected the ideas, tastes and intellectual attitudes of humanists, in particular, their confidence in the persuasive power of the word, their understanding of the relationship between dialectics and rhetoric, their ‘amateurish’ view of learning as an informal exchange of ideas among free men and, finally, their desire to imitate those classical authors-both Greek (Plato, Xenophon, Lucian) and Latin (Cicero)— who had favoured the dialogue as a genre.1 Certain Renaissance historians have, however, overestimated the merits of their particular period, producing incomplete and one-sided evaluations, which have, in turn, sparked off reactions on the part of medievalists. Recently, Peter von Moos has demolished the view, promoted by Bakhtin and his followers, that the dialogue-centred culture of the fifteenth century overcame ‘the authoritarian structure of monologue-based discourse’, which had supposedly reigned, without competition, for a thousand years. In fact, from Carolingian times onwards, it is easy to find dialogues on pastoral, pedagogical, political, philosophical and theological subjects. Furthermore, some of these dialogues are by no means merely vehicles of indoctrination, but are instead sophisticated and mature works, in both literary and intellectual terms.2
