Humanist Condolences. Funerary Collections in Quattrocento Italy.

Expressing sympathy to relatives, friends, and colleagues after the passing of a loved one is a habit that belongs to every age, yet the way people console one another evolves throughout history. In the Italian Renaissance, the act of consoling was revolutionized, as humanists began to compose funerary collections that gave voice to their grief. These collections consisted of letters, treatises, orations, dialogues, and poems, written by different authors in Latin, Greek, and the vernacular upon the death of a prominent person. The proposed research project explores how these funerary collections became a literary custom, by examining the phenomenon at its roots, namely, the collections assembled in fifteenth-century Italy. The PDM will be devoted to a comparative pilot study on a selection of five thematically connected funerary collections (1461-1488) with the death of a child or an adolescent as common subject. The study will shed light on the similarities and differences in composition, approach, perception, and historical impact, as well as on possible relationships between the different contributors and collections.

Keywords:funerary collections, Italian Quattrocento, death and consolation, history of childhood, history of emotions and history of ideas

Disciplines:Literatures in Latin