Renaissance Prose from Italy

Italian Renaissance prose encompasses narrative, dialogue, letters, history, and scholarship in both Italian and Latin. Boccaccio developed extended settings for storytelling, Petrarch used letters and reflection to explore learning and inward life, and Castiglione shaped discussion of courtly conduct as conversation. Classical texts supplied models that writers adapted to the concerns of their own communities. The relationship between eloquence and judgment runs through these different forms. Prose could preserve an experience, weigh a course of action, or give a social world continuity through the voices of its participants.