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 The Family in Renaissance FlorenceBooks One–Four
Leon Battista Alberti (translated by Renée Neu Watkins)
The four books of The Family in Renaissance Florence do not present a single, homogeneously bourgeois outlook. They are a monument of attitudes. Written as a dialogue, they express conflicting points of view, enabling today’s readers to relive social and moral conflicts that troubled early capitalist society. Alberti’s personages confront much of what it means to be consciously urban—to experience social mobility, to recognize the psychological as well as the practical importance of purchased commodities, to wish in vain for stable families and firm public authority
amid fluctuating fortunes and alliances.
$21.95 list, 332 pages 10-digit ISBN: 1-57766-335-7 13-digit ISBN: 978-157766-335-5 © 1969
“Renée Neu Watkins’s classic translation has made one of the masterworks of Renaissance humanism accessible to the English-speaking world for a generation. In her clear, clean English, Alberti’s characters come to vivid life. No other text conveys so rich a sense of the life of a great family in fifteenth-century Florence, or offers so rich an introduction to the great humanist debates about the meaning of education and the nature of virtue. It is a pleasure to have it in print once more.” — Tony Grafton, Princeton University
“In her introduction, Watkins establishes the relevance of this work to the current discussion of the role of civic humanism in the Italian Renaissance. This, along with the enduring importance of Alberti’s social commentary, recommends the book to the college and university audience, as well as to scholars who like their Alberti Anglicized.” — Choice
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