Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance.(Book Review)

by Lauro Martines (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins U.P., 2001; pp. 357. 29.50 [pounds sterling])

The main purpose of this work, concerned with the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, is to suggest the relationship between stories and poems and the social settings from which they emerged and which they reflected. Two chapters are on a slightly different tack, concerned with political utterance. The later of the two, 'Crisis in the Generation of 1494', is an interesting account of the way in which poets reacted to the upheavals and disruption of society and politics in the time of the Italian Wars. This is an important subject which might have been …