A Companion to Anticlassicisms in the Cinquecento

Anticlassicisms, as a plural, react to the many possible forms of classicisms. In the sixteenth century, classicist tendencies range from humanist traditions focusing on Horace and the teachings of rhetoric, via Pietro Bembos canonization of a second antiquity in the works of the fourteenth-century classics, Petrarch and Boccaccio, to the Aristotelianism of the second half of the century. Correspondingly, the various tendencies to destabilize or to subvert or contradict these manifold and historically dynamic classicisms need to be distinguished as so many anticlassicisms. This volume, after discussing the history and possible implications of the label anticlassicism in Renaissance studies, differentiates and analyzes these anticlassicisms. It distinguishes the various forms of opposition to classicisms as to their scope (on a scale between radical poetological dissension to merely sectorial opposition in a given literary genre) and to their alternative models, be they authors (like Dante) or texts. At the same time, the various chapters specify the degree of difference or erosion inherent in anticlassicist tendencies with respect to their classicist counterparts, ranging from implicit system disturbances to open, intended antagonism (as in Bernesque poetry), with a view to establishing an overall picture of this field of phenomena for the first time.