This chapter investigates the crucial significance of Lucian for early modern Italian literature and culture. From the late fourteenth century, Lucian’s writings were employed by Italian humanists to learn Greek and contributed considerably towards sparking a remarkable interest in the ancient Greek-speaking world. From Italy, Lucian’s fame travelled to the rest of Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lucian’s fictional dialogues and paradoxical encomia deeply informed the oeuvre of many prominent writers, among them Leon Battista Alberti, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Lodovico Ariosto. Moreover, this study aims to shed light on the variety of different roles played by Lucian within the Renaissance. By taking into account unexplored matters, such as the impact of vernacular translations, it is possible to distinguish between a ‘didactic-moral’, a ‘useful and delightful’, and a ‘heterodox-heretical’ understanding of Lucian in early modern Italy. On the one hand, such differentiation allows to finesse the connections between the reception of his oeuvre and the political, cultural, as well as religious transformations of that time (e.g. the printing revolution and the Counter-Reformation). On the other hand, it shows that some features of Lucian’s poetics – especially humour, satire, and parrhesia – acted throughout the Renaissance as frameworks that influenced the early modern comprehension of fundamental issues, such as literary imitation and fictionality.

Chapter 4 studies the variety of reading practices that characterised the vernacular reception of Aristotle amidst the controversies between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘humanists’ in fifteenth-century Florence. The chapter examines the role played by vernacular translation as a facilitator for the interaction of the two different perspectives. Along with discussions of figures such as Domenico Da Prato and Leonardo Bruni, I explore the proactive role played by readers in shaping the boundaries of philosophical culture in the vernacular. To this purpose, special attention is given to the compositional strategies deployed by cultivated merchants in zibaldoni (notebooks) such as Giovanni Rucellai’s, where conflicts of cultures were resolved under the aegis of the layman’s curiosity. Similar preoccupations inform the manuscript transmission of Bernardo Nuti’s Italian translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (c. 1460). Extant manuscript copies of Nuti’s version (which was based on Leonardo Bruni’s ‘humanist’ rendering of the Ethics) have much to tell us about the social, ideological and political patterns that characterized the reception of Aristotle’s moral philosophy in the period.

Renaissance thinkers affirmed that also in terms of justice and friendship the relationship between the human couple reflected what it was that held together the citizens in the city. This chapter examines the immense importance of thinking about friendship and love for political reflection, and it shows the relationship of civic concord and friendship with the domestic sphere, and particularly with the conjugal relationship. This chapter studies early modern commentaries on Cicero’s De officiis as well as celebrated works of the ‘civic tradition’, namely Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia and Matteo Palmieri’s Della Vita Civile, showing that the learned Aristotelian tradition we have so far studied found its echoes also in the Ciceronian tradition as well as in the volgare. These commentaries and vernacular writings serve as part of the context necessary to understand more fully Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought on family, friendship, and sociability, which has so far not found adequate attention in historical scholarship. Re-examining some of the ways that Machiavelli constructed masculinity and femininity, and setting them into their intellectual context, this chapter aims to show that Machiavelli’s political thought was characterised by a remarkable openness towards the idea of women as dominant agents in the political sphere and by a sense of what we can term, in a postmodern manner, ‘fluidity’ of gender conceptions, in which ‘biology’ was certainly no determining factor. The chapter thus contributes to the question of the nature of Machiavelli’s stato.