Event

The Center for Italian Studies
The Italian Division at the University of Pennsylvania
invites you to a talk by Eva Del Soldato

Is philosophy a pursuit to be limited to the halls of universities, the property of the highly educated, or something which can be legitimately undertaken by ordinary people? The question was as relevant in sixteenth-century Italy as it is today, and in the literary academies of Florence and Padua it concerned primarily the linguistic dimension: can philosophy be written into the vernacular, or should it be jealously preserved in Latin? The topic attracted professors, printers, and self-educated tailors alike, who pondered the relative merits of the two languages, and the anxieties and possibilities provoked by contamination between them. Through the examples of Simone Porzio, Benedetto Varchi and Antonio Brucioli, the outlines of this debate and its significance for European intellectual history will be described.

Reception to follow