Fornaciari: Novelle Scelte dal Decamerone di Giovanni Boccaccio, Sansone, Firenze 1902. The Vittorio Cian edition of Castiglione's "Il Gortegiano" (Firenze, 1894) has been examined for the selections borrowed from that work, and the text of the eleven chapters of Machiavelli's “Il Principe" is substantially the text of the L. A. Burd edition (London, Clarendon Press, 1891). Yet in each group of selections certain liberties have been taken with the text examined in order to render the language suitable for class use. The notes do not pretend to be exhaustive, but aim to explain briefly certain historical references and linguistic peculiarities. Interpretations are likewise given here and there for certain words or expressions not broadly defined in ordinary Italian-English dictionaries. The editor is much indebted to Professor C. H. Grandgent of Harvard University for numerous helpful and scholarly suggestions. Introduction THE transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance may be compared to a great picture which has been thrown upon a screen, and which gradually dissolves into another picture differing only slightly from the first one. So gradual, indeed, is the process of blending that it is difficult to say just where the first picture ends and the second begins. Thus in this great historic transition, the decaying elements of the earlier period mingled for a time with the germs of the new era. John Addington Symonds has summed up the situation as follows: "The word 'Renaissance' has of late years received a more extended significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent "The Revival of Learning.' We use it to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World; and though it is possible to assign certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say-between this year and that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to name the days on which spring began and ended."* Great, indeed, has been the cultural significance of the Renaissance, that brilliant epoch in which the minds of ambitious men were aglow with infinite possibilities in various realms of educational activity; when freedom of thought had finally gained the ascendancy over the superstitious obsessions and scholastic fallacies of the so-called "Dark Ages." Nature was again to be loved for her own true self. Man was to be estimated at his intrinsic value. Literature was to be freed from the pressure of allegory and the narrowness of ephemeral and fanciful interpretation. To Italy belongs the honor of having inaugurated the Rennaissance; and especially * Renaissance in Italy-Age of the Despots, J. A. Symonds, London, 1875, p. 1. |