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The Family in Renaissance Florence

Book Three

 

Leon Battista Alberti (translated by Renée Neu Watkins)

 

A classic of Italian literature! The chief merit of this work lies in its scope: it directly assays the personal value system of the Florentine bourgeois class, which did so much to foster the development of art, literature, and science. It displays a variety of high styles—high rhetoric, systematic moral exposition, novelistic portrayal of character—in the typical Renaissance framework of the dialogue. The treatise, in its entirety, shows a Florentine paterfamilias and two uncles instructing some submissive nephews in the ethics of private life. Money and reputation are its primary themes. Book III, the most dramatic, far-ranging, and down-to-earth of the four books, does not present a single bourgeois outlook but, as a dialogue, expresses conflicting points of view, enabling students to relive social and moral conflicts that troubled early capitalist society.

The Family in Renaissance Florence, Books One–Four

Brucker, Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence

 

$12.95 list, 118  pages

10-digit ISBN: 0-88133-821-4

13-digit ISBN: 978-0-88133-821-8

© 1994

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“This is a wonderful primary source, very accessible and germane for students today.”  — Eric Dursteler, Brigham Young University

 

“A very useful and concise introduction to some of the social attitudes of Renaissance  Christine Kooi, Louisiana State University

 

“Students particularly enjoyed the General Prologue and became involved in classroom debates about the image of women presented in the book.”  — Joseph F. Patrouch, Florida International University

 

“This is an excellent translation of an original source, with an introduction by one of the leading scholars working on the Renaissance family.”   — Larissa Taylor, Colby College