"Giovanni Pontano, who adopted the academic sobriquet ""Gioviano,"" was prime minister to several kings of Naples and the most important Neapolitan humanist of the quattrocento. Best known today as a Latin poet, he also composed dialogues depicting the intellectual life of the humanist academy of which he was the head, and, late in life, a number of moral essays that became his most popular prose works. The De sermone (On Speech), translated into English here for the first time, aims to provide a moral anatomy, following Aristotelian principles, of various aspects of speech such as truthfulness and deception, flattery, gossip, loquacity, calumny, mercantile bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule. In each type of speech, Pontano tries to identify what should count as the virtuous mean, that which identifies the speaker as a person of education, taste, and moral probity."
By:
Giovanni Gioviano Pontano Edited and translated by:
G. W. Pigman III Imprint: Harvard University Press Country of Publication: United States Dimensions:
Height: 203mm,
Width: 133mm,
ISBN:9780674987500 ISBN 10: 0674987500 Series:The I Tatti Renaissance Library Pages: 544 Publication Date:17 September 2019 Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: Active
G. W. Pigman III is Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology.