Italian 311MA - Advanced Topics in Italian: 'The Era of Machiavelli: Politics, Anxiety, and Dissimulation in the Italian Renaissance'

Often described as spaces that offered a safe harbor for generations of poets, artists, and intellectuals, Italian Renaissance courts were also a space of uncertainty and dissimulation, a political environment dominated by rules, a reality in which instability and manipulation were commonplace. Through the reading of works by Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Castiglione, three protagonists in the history of Italian literature between the end of the 15th and the first quarter of the 16th centuries, we will consider and analyze the Italian Renaissance not only as the cradle of extraordinary artistic, poetic, social, intellectual, economic, and geographic achievements, but also as a time in which the relationship between literature and structures of power reaches a crucial inflection point.

Prereq: 8 credits from the Humanities.