The Beginnings of the Flowering of Greek Studies in the Context of Early Italian Humanism: Barlaam of Seminara, Francesco Petrarch, Leontios Pilatos, Giovanni Boccaccio
Abstract
These papers focus on delineating of early Italian humanists’ efforts to lay the foundations of knowledge of ancient Greek language and literature in the Florentine milieu hand in hand with the new Latin versions of ancient classical texts, respectively Homer‘s poems Odyssey and Iliad; the first 466 lines of Euripides‘ Hecube; fragments from Plutarch‘s Lives, and Pseudo--Aristotelean corpus De mirabilibus auscultationibus (On Marvellous Things Heard) – all of them made by Leontios Pilatos. The article tries to outline the patterns of “contact situation” between Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio on one side and Barlaam of Seminara and Leontios Pilatos, largely representants of mixed Calabrian Greco-Italian culture sphere, on the other.
The stress is put on a relevant moments to describe the ideological backgrounds of “Petrarchian humanism” relating to the revival of Greek studies and the merit of influence on further generations of Italian humanists.