Abstract
Italian is distinguished from the other romance literatures in lacking a medieval warring epic — there is no equivalent in Italy to the Chanson de Roland or the Poema de mio Cid. The reasons for this may be complex, but it seems significant that the Italians were neither carrying fire and sword into other lands, nor engaging in any sustained and valiant resistance to foreign invasion in the period when their vernacular literature was emerging. On the contrary they were on the receiving end of conquering armies: their peoples were divided and dispersed and quite incapable of establishing any credible force to oppose the Goths, Lombards and Franks who swept into Italy after the collapse of the Roman Empire. But, whatever the reason, the fact remains that the earliest vernacular verse in Italy is Sicilian love poetry, and the first major work is a religious poem, the Divine Comedy.
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Further Reading
H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny ( Princeton, NJ, 1967 ).
C. C. Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence (Toronto, 1961 ).
C. P. Brand, Ludovico Ariosto (Edinburgh, 1974 ).
C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso Cambridge, 1965 ).
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E. G. Hayward, ‘The Querelle of Arms and Letters during the Renaissance in Italy’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Edinburgh University, 1982 ).
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P. Pieri, Guerra e politica negli scrittori italiani (Milan, 1955 ).
B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961 ).
N. Wood (ed.), N. Machiavelli: The Art of War (Indianapolis, 1965).
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© 1989 J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring
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Brand, C.P. (1989). The Poetry of War in the Italian Renaissance. In: Mulryne, J.R., Shewring, M. (eds) War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19734-7_5
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