Conspiracy Literature in Early Renaissance Italy: Historiography and Princely Ideology. Marta Celati. Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xvi + 290 pp. $90

• Published in: Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 75; no. 3; pp. 1094 - 1095
• Main Author: Basile, Gaston Javier
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.10.2022
• Subjects: Conspiracy; Fiction; Genre; Historiography; Ideology; Literary criticism; Italy
• ISSN: 0034-4338; 1935-0236
• DOI: 10.1017/rqx.2022.295

Here Celati revisits the mainstream interpretation of Alberti's work as sympathetic toward Porcari and critical of the pope's pontificate by showing that Alberti's views on the conspirators, despite the apparent disapproval of the papal government, are unmistakably negative. The strength of the volume lies in the full-fledged discussion of a selection of humanist texts on conspiracies that gives attention to their respective contexts of production and reception, the authors’ reworking of classical models, and the wider political implications of the texts in buttressing an individualized authority (increasingly associated with the princeps or pater patriae). The study would have also gained from a more rigorous definition of the notion of genre—a term often ambiguously used—as well as some theoretical awareness of the interpretive (and, thereby, ideological) nature of historical narratives in general, which blurs the distinction between history and fiction that the book seems to (unadvisedly) endorse.