Table of Contents

Part I: Text; Part II: Prefaces, List of Translations; Part III: Catalogues.

About the Author

Marianne Pade is professor of Classical Philology at Aarhus University.

Reviews

"... Pade's study is a substantial contribution to the study of fifteenth-century Italian humanism. The transcriptions and indices of her second volume also provide resource for other scholars. The book is beautifully produced and generously illustrated." - Julia Haig Gaisser, Renaissance Quarterly, spring 2008 "Though much of this material had been published before, both by P. herself and by earlier scolars, there never has been a comparable effort at a comprehensive survey, and many points of detail, especially pertaining to dates, are reassessed and corrected here. On the whole this is an impressive piece of meticulous scolarship, and vol. ii contains a great amount of raw material that can be utilized. The two volumes are beautifully produced with some eye-catching illustrations; there are but a few trivial misprints and virtually no mistakes in the text. Plutarch would have loved this book." Joseph Geiger, Scripta Classica Israelica Vol. XXVII, 2008 "Outstanding Title! Pade (Univ. of Aarhus) offers a major new study about how the Italian Renaissance used ancient sources. Plutarch, a Greek, wrote lives of great Greek and Roman public figures. The Middle Ages did not know them well, partly because of the lack of good Latin translations from the Greek. By contrast, 15th-century humanists loved them. They translated lives not previously translated, produced new translations of others, and used the lives to air views about government and society. Florentine humanists used Plutarch's Lives to endorse a republican, civic ideology. Venetian humanists used the Lives to present Venice as the heir to ancient Greece and the public figures as mirrors of behavior for members of the Venetian ruling class. Guarino Guarini, by contrast, used some lives to defend Caesar against humanist republican critics. In volume 2, Pade provides detailed information about 578 manuscripts containing Latin translations of one or more lives, and prints the Latin prefaces of many. The book is comprehensively documented and has 16 lovely color illustrations. A fine combination of technically challenging research and a good understanding of the Italian Renaissance, the book is a major scholarly achievement. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers/faculty." - P. Grendler, CHOICE, aug. 2008. "This is the sort of work that could not have been achieved under the tyranny of the British Research Assessment Exercise. When I was a graduate student, Marianne Pade was pointed out to me as the scholar hard at work cataloguing all the humanist translations of Plutarch's Lives. My receding hairline tells me that was more than a dozen years ago. In the meantime, her many articles have given witness to the progress of her work; the republic of letters has been patiently expectant of the final product. It was worth the wait. ... What she has produced is a monumental and definitive two-volume work. Its closest parallel is James Hankins's 1990 Plato in the Italian Renaissance, a work alongside which it will not blush to stand on bookshelves. Like that, it is a work of meticulous research demonstrated by the listing of manuscripts and the editions of prefaces that occupy the second tome. In the first, Pade reveals her impressive grasp of the bibliography of her subject, and her mastery of the evidence she marshalls. ... While there will, naturally, be debates around some of the interpretation, what will make this work a monument more lasting than bronze is its status as a treasure-trove of knowledge. ... In short, these volumes will surely attain the long shelf-life they deserve Chr(45) much longer, one suspects, than many works rushed into print under the RAE regime." - David Rundle, Renaissance Studies, Vol. 23, 1, 2008 "Those interested in the Classical tradition in the Renaissance are fortunate to have available this voluminous and well-edited monograph by Professor Marianne Pade, who for almost twenty years has regularly published other articles on the topic. Although her work is clearly grounded in a particular place and time (Italy from ca.1400 to ca.1460 AD), Professor Pade provides a succinct and accurate background for the nonspecialist reader (1:37-87), explaining the tradition and influence of Plutarch in the Greco-Roman imperial world, in Byzantium, and in the Christian West up to the fourteenth century (above all with the mysterious Institutio Traiani, which has been a controversial topic for scholars). ... The two volumes are a great source of information to those interested in Plutarch's tradition and translation of his texts in the fifteenth century, not only in Italy but in other countries as well, to the same level in which humanism appeared in countries such as Spain, France, etc. ... In conclusion, the book is an excellent work and an opportunity to reflect one more time on the extraordinary role played in the history of European culture by the translator ..." - Jorge Bergua Cavero, Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIX/4 (2008).