Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters.

Ronnie H. Terpening, Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1997. vii +310 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-8020-4159-0.

Tommaso Campanella - rebel, philosopher, prophet, poet, and prisoner - is surely one of the most extraordinary figures of the late Italian Renaissance. His extensive writings (a number of them available in modern editions thanks to the endeavors of Luigi Firpo and other Italian scholars) have provided material for specialized scholarship on each of the many sides of the Calabrian friar: the utopian and eugenic ideas expressed in La citta del sole, his religious beliefs, his political actions and ideas, his metaphysics, his philosophy of nature, and his poetry. But only now, with the publication of John M. Headley's Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World, do we have a much needed comprehensive study that fully situates both the man and his writings in historical and political context. This richly informative book is likely to remain the standard English-language work on Campanella for many years to come. In it, the author draws upon the entire range of Campanella's writings - scattered and minor items as well as major formal statements - to trace in meticulous detail the interactions between the twists and turns of his remarkable life and the patterns of his thought. Headley brings out both Campanella's genuine radicalism and his responsiveness to changing political and personal circumstances, while at the same time emphasizing the rootedness of many of his ideas in earlier cultural and religious traditions.

An opening biographical section follows Campanella from peasant origins through entry into the Dominican order, participation in intellectual circles in Naples, messianic leadership of a failed revolt, appalling torture, twenty-seven years of imprisonment (and prolific writing), a brief span of papal favor in Rome, and the old prophet's final adventures in France. The second and longer section of the work analyzes Campanella's engagement with the great issues of his time: the remaking of natural philosophy and political thought, the reform of religion, and the relation of religion and government. Headley closely relates the writings of each phase of Campanella's career to his actual situation and to the immediate and the larger political context at the time. In following the career of his tormented subject the author presents a remarkable panorama of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century European society, ranging from the intellectual life of late sixteenth-century Naples, to the social history of prisons in early modern Europe, the political maneuvers of Cardinal Richelieu, and much else besides. He also brings out the highly politicized, confessional, and self-interested motivations of some of Campanella's professed contemporary admirers.

The author shows that Campanella's views both maintained essential consistency over long periods of his life and combined highly disparate elements present in late Renaissance culture. Thus, in Campanella modernizing scientific ideas - repudiation of Aristotelianism, enthusiasm for empiricism, Galilean science, and geographic exploration - co-existed with prophetic fervor. Campanella's view of religion, which Headley shows in an astute exegesis to have been at bottom naturalistic, despite its surface orthodoxy, was joined to hieratic and universalizing concepts of papal theocracy and Dominican world evangalization. His political ideas managed simultaneously to embrace populist demands for social justice, messianic prophecy of a new order, and advocacy of a universal empire in the hands of Spain or (later in his career) France.

In addition to a learned and persuasive account of the different elements in Campanella's thought, the work provides much information about the early dissemination of his writings in manuscript and print and about the impact of his ideas, sufferings, and personality. Actual acquaintance with Campanella sometimes disillusioned admirers who variously appreciated his ideas, saw him as a victim of Spanish and/or inquisitorial oppression, or were simply awed by his power to survive torture and imprisonment; moreover, in intellectual terms by his last years in France he was in some respects a figure from a past age. Yet Cardinal Richelieu remained sufficiently impressed to summon Campanella to examine the naked body of the infant dauphin (the future Louis XIV) and prepare his horoscope.

The Venetian humanist and poligrafo Lodovico Dolce was a very different type of late Renaissance intellectual. He is probably best known today as the author of dialogues on painting and on the position of women that have attracted the attention of art historians and specialists in women's history, respectively, and perhaps also for his friendship with Pietro Aretino. But as Ronnie Terpening shows in this study of Dolce's other works, he was a man of indefatigable energy who, in the service of the publisher Gabriel Giolito and on his own account, poured out a stream of hundreds of editions, translations, adaptations, and more or less original works in many genres and on an encyclopedic range of subjects. Although in most respects a model of industrious conventionality, Dolce encountered, in mild form, the constraints upon sixteenth-century intellectual life, since on two separate occasions inquisitors investigated his use of particular books (without any conviction resulting). Terpening initially presents this study as an account of a minor figure that throws much light upon an entire milieu, as is indeed the case, but often shifts into vigorous argument in defense of Dolce's literary endeavors.

Following a biographical introduction, separate chapters are devoted to Dolce's chivalric romances, his comedies, two of his tragedies (Marianna and Didone), and his prose dialogues and treatises. Terpening situates these works in the context of other contemporary productions in the same genres or on the same themes, being especially concerned to demonstrate that Dolce's reliance on imitation, tradition, and earlier models is no greater than that of many other authors of the period. The chapter on the prose treatises shows Dolce at work as a popularizer - and to that extent educator - on subjects ranging across history (lives of Charles V and Ferdinand), natural knowledge (works on gems and colors), the art of memory, and more. Among the prose works discussed in some detail are two treatises on marriage that are considerably more misogynistic than Dolce's better known dialogue on the position of women. Terpening's work provides some new insights into the milieu of printing, publishing, and authorship in mid-century Venice and, especially in the last chapter, includes material that is likely to be of interest to cultural and intellectual historians as well as literary scholars.

NANCY G. SIRAISI City University of New York, Hunter College and the Graduate School