Remembering in the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History)

An assessment of how four humanists in the court of Pope Clement VII - Pietro Alcionio, Pietro Corsi, Jacopo Sadoleto, and Pierio Valeriano - interpreted the cataclysmic Sack of Rome (1527), which called into question their earlier images of the Renaissance papacy. Building upon recent discussions in literary criticism and cognitive psychology, the author elucidates how these humanists' narratives gave meaningful shape to their memories and, in so doing, helped to redefine the image of Renaissance Rome as it would be remembered by subsequent generations. Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii A Note on the Transcriptions and Translations xv Prelude: 6 May 1527 xvii Chapter One: The Sack of Rome and the Theme of Cultural Discontinuity 1 Chapter Two: Pietro Alcionio's Orations on the Sack of Rome 31 Chapter Three: Pietro Corsi's Perpetuation of Curialist Ideology 73 Chapter Four: Renegotiation and Remembrance: Jacopo Sadoleto's Letters to Curial Friends, 1527-1529 103 Chapter Five: The Italian Humanism of Pierio Valeriano 143 Chapter Six: Traumatic Memory into History: The Cultural Significance of Humanists' Narratives of the Sack of Rome 168 Plates: Two details from BAV MS Vat. Lat. 3436 175 Appendix One: Orations of Pietro Alcionio 179 Appendix Two: Letters from Sadoleto to Clement VII 213 Bibliography 219 Index 229 An assessment of how four humanists at the court of Pope Clement VII - Pietro Alcionio, Pietro Corsi, Jacopo Sadoleto, and Pierio Valeriano - interpreted the cataclysmic Sack of Rome (1527), which called into question their earlier images of the Renaissance papacy. Building upon recent discussions in literary criticism and cognitive psychology, the author elucidates how these humanists' narratives gave meaningful shape to their memories and, in so doing, helped to redefine the image of Renaissance Rome as it would be "remembered" by subsequent generations This study, drawing extensively upon manuscript sources, provides the first comprehensive account of how Rome's humanist community coped with the 1527 sack of the city, an event traditionally viewed as signaling the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.