literature vernacular Archives

How a lost manuscript revealed the first poets of Italian literature

Six Tuscan Poets by Giorgio Vasari, 1544. Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch, Cino da Pistoia, Guittone d’Arezzo and Guido Cavalcanti are depicted in the oil painting. Wikimedia/MIA Maria Clotilde Camboni, University of Oxford Imagine a world where we knew the name of Homer, but the poetry of The Odyssey was lost to us. That was the world of the early …