Humanist Condolences. Funerary Collections in Quattrocento Italy.

How people express grief and sympathy in situations of death and loss is conditioned by culture. When, in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Italy, Renaissance humanism gradually replaced medieval ways of thinking, a new literary phenomenon emerged, as humanists began to compile funerary collections. These collections, preserved in both manuscripts and incunables, consist of treatises, letters, orations, poems, and dialogues that were composed – mostly in Latin, but sometimes in Greek or the vernacular – by different authors, on the occasion of a prominent person’s death and that were subsequently assembled. This literary practice would become widespread in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
By examining this phenomenon at its origins in fifteenth-century Italy, my research project explores how grief took shape as a literary project. I study these collections according to a horizontal and a vertical approach: horizontally, the project maps and describes the content, material aspects, and literary characteristics of these collections; vertically, the project provides in-depth analyses of six representative collections. In this way, the project will trace the similarities and differences in content, approach, and impact of the various collections, as well as the sociocultural context and historical evolution of the phenomenon. As a result, the project will illumine the humanists’ approach to death and grief, and their intellectual culture and networks.