Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines a little-studied work by Leon Battista Alberti, his Musca, a rewriting of the Greek satirist Lucian's Eulogy of the Fly. It shows how the Neapolitan poet invented a new myth to rival the founding myth of modern poetry revived by Petrarch, that of Apollo and Daphne. The book also shows how the Ferranese writer's deployment of the shadow motif anticipates in some thematic respects Giordano Bruno's early De umbris ideamm. It explores the attempt to graft onto English poetry the quantitative metrics typical of Latin and Greek verse. The book offers a broad portrait of Bruno, outlining the consistency of his approach to authority in a range of areas: philosophy, theology, literature. It focuses on directly from Hilary Gatti's work, and draws on several of her essays that deal with the presence of Bruno in early modern English drama.