In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

This chapter focuses on an important work of Angelo Poliziano, called Lamia. In it, Poliziano does two things relevant to the humanities today: he offers a new way of thinking about the enterprise of philosophy as it was understood since antiquity – the search for human wisdom and a wise style of life. In doing so, he suggests that academic philosophy as practiced in universities is not enough in the project of gaining wisdom and living wisely. Second, he suggests that philology – the deep, borderless reading of texts – represents a master discipline and one that is in fact more in line with philosophy’s authentic mission. Poliziano makes his most trenchant points by using narratives and fables, rather than syllogistic argumentation. In so doing, he makes a case for philology as an overarching discipline of disciplines and sets forth a new way of looking at philosophy

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

As Charles Dempsey has argued, humanist culture often came about not through the revival of ancient models, but through the recasting of contemporary vernacular culture in light of ancient models. A central thesis of this book is that the ubiquitous humanist practice of solo singing to the lyre took shape principally in Florence, in the circles of Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici/Angelo Poliziano, through adaptation of certain aspects of traditional canterino practice. This chapter sets forth what we know about the cantare ad lyram activity in these circles, establishes its clear relationship to civic practices, and argues for its integral role in both the Neoplatonic philosophy of Ficino and the vernacular poetics of Lorenzo and Poliziano. This leads to new perspectives on both Ficino’s “Orphic singing to the lyre” and Lorenzo’s lifelong involvement with singing to the lyre, both of which are typically regarded as idiosyncratic and tangential to their serious intellectual pursuits. This chapter also provides the occasion for considering the extraordinary figure of Baccio Ugolini, one of the great improvvisatori of his day, and a reassessment of Poliziano’s Fabula d’Orfeo in which Baccio sang the title role in 1480.