This book is centered on the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), on his two-year stay in Sicily in 1492-4 to study the ancient Greek language under one of its most distinguished contemporary teachers, the Byzantine emigre Constantine Lascaris, and above all on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The more particular focus of this study is on the imaginative capacities that crucially shape Bembo's elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna adventure in his so-called De Aetna, published at the Aldine press in Venice in 1496. This work is cast in the form of a dialogue that takes place between the young Bembo and his father Bernardo (himself a prominent Venetian statesman with strong humanist involvements) after Pietro's return to Venice from Sicily in 1494. But De Aetna offers much more than a one-dimensional account of the facts, sights and findings of Pietro's climb. Far more important in the present study is his eye for creative elaboration, or for transforming his
literal experience on the mountain into a meditation on his coming-of-age at a remove from the conventional career-path expected of one of his station within the Venetian patriciate. Three mutually informing features that are critical to the artistic originality of De Aetna receive detailed treatment in this study: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complex history of Mount Etna as treated in the Greco-Roman literary tradition from Pindar onwards; (ii) the striking novelty of De Aetna's status as the first Latin text produced at the nascent Aldine press in the prototype of what modern typography knows as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro's ingenious deployment of Etna as a powerful, multivalent symbol that simultaneously reflects the diverse characterizations of, and the generational differences between, father and son in the course of their dialogical exchanges within De Aetna.
Industry Reviews
"Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist makes an indispensable contribution to our understanding of Venetian humanism, while paving the way for future explorations of Renaissance literature at the intersection of classical antiquity, print technology, and transformations in spatiality and visual culture." -- Luke Roman, Pheonix
"Pietro Bembo on Etna is an ambitious book that accomplishes a great deal. Classicists and early modernists alike will benefit from Williams's brilliant rendering of De Aetna, his meticulous tracing of the "Etna Idea," and his impressive leveraging of several scholarly literatures to excavate the poetic, scientific, and historical layers of meaning in Bembo's brief but riveting dialogue." --Seventeenth-Century News
"Anchored in scholarly authority and...masterfully argued with extraordinary sagacity... Essential for those who love the Italian Renaissance and want to know more about one of its fundamental figures." --Renaissance Quarterly
"Williams ... moves deftly from one episode or argument to the next. He nails down each with a philologist's precision, while still offering a critic's imaginative interpretation." --Anthony Grafton, London Review of Books
"[Williams'] volume is a carefully-crafted delight which interweaves rigorous scholarship on the Classical intertexts and Humanist influences of Bembo's De Aetna with a beautiful thread detailing the painfully human relationship between Bembo father and son." --Journal of Roman Studies
"In both presentation and content, then, this volume deserves whole-hearted recommendation. [Williams] demonstrates a magisterial command of a wide range of scholarly concerns, from the history of mountaineering to the complex political and scholarly landscape of Quattrocento Venice. Set against this broad backdrop of interests, the volume is also clearly rooted in a deep and confident command of the extensive and multi-lingual literature concerning Pietro
Bembo in particular. Part-biography, part-critical edition, interspersed with surveys of art, printing and Classical volcanic literature, this volume is sure to become a well-thumbed reference for students
and researchers across a range of fields." --The Classical Review
"this rich and intelligent study uses [De Aetna] as a consistently enticing way into Bembo's intellectual world. ... This is unquestionably the definitive work on the De Aetna in any language, but it is also indispensable for readers with interests in any aspect of Bembo's own achievement or the early-16th-century cultural innovations in whose development and promotion Bembo played such a vital part. A valuable resource for scholars interested
in Italian, neo-Latin, and/or Renaissance literary and cultural studies. ... Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." --S. Botterill, CHOICE
"This book offers the fullest reading available of De Aetna, a dialogue in which Pietro Bembo, an important figure in the history of Italian Renaissance literature, recounts an ascent that he had made of Mount Etna in Sicily. In clear, engaging prose, Williams shows how this often-misunderstood work marks both a turning point in the development of Italian Renaissance humanism and a key step in the self-fashioning of its famous author, in which Bembo
presents to the world the image of himself that he wanted to have disseminated. Highly recommended." --Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University
"This captivating, wide-ranging study of Pietro Bembo's volcanic dialogue takes us from one end of Italy to the other, from the canals of Venice to the edge of Mount Etna's perpetually smoking crater, moving deftly through subjects that range from the history of mountaineering, the history of print, and the beginnings of empirical science, to a sensitive, sympathetic portrayal of the complex relationship between a remarkable father and a remarkable son. A
reader's delight!" --Ingrid Rowland, University of Notre Dame
"Williams's volume is a carefully-crafted delight which interweaves rigorous scholarship on the Classical intertexts and Humanist influences of Bembo's De Aetna with a beautiful thread detailing the painfully human relationship between Bembo father and son." -- Martin T. Dinter, Journal of Roman Studies
