Glad To Go For a Feast: Milton, Buonmattei, and the Florentine “Accademici (Studies in Italian Culture)

Glad To Go For a Feast focuses upon Milton’s intellectual contacts in Florence during his sojourn from 1638 to 1639, especially those accademici surrounding the grammarian and Dantista Benedetto Buonmattei (1581-1648), including Carlo Roberto Dati (1619-1676) and Agostino Coltellini (1613-1693). Dr. A. M. Cinquemani provides a brief life of Buonmattei as priest, scholar, and accademico as well as a discussion of Della Lingua Toscana (1623-1643) as having perhaps shaped Milton’s representation of prelapsarian language in Paradise Lost . The tendencies of contemporary Florentine criticism, as suggested by the work of Buonmattei, are considered with a view to understanding the particular version of Dante to which Milton was exposed. Large portions of Della Lingua Toscana and Buonmattei’s commentaries on Dante, as well as Coltellini’s «Tuscan Areopagitica,» the Introduzione all’ Anatomia (1651), are presented here for the first time in English.