Sabbatical Spans Middle Ages and Renaissance

Angelo Mazzocco, professor of Spanish and Italian, is back in his office in Ciruti after an extremely productive sabbatical during the fall semester, which saw him in the United States and Italy, presenting and publishing work that spanned the middle ages and the Renaissance. He began by representing MHC as the only professor from the United States invited to participate in the international congress celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, in Bari, Italy. Mazzocco's paper, titled “Il rapporto tra gli umanisti italiani e gli umanistic spagnoli al tempo di Alessandro VI” will appear in the forthcoming volume of the proceedings.

He went on to deliver a paper titled “The Concept of Classical Rebirth in Rome, Florence, and Venice: A Comparative Study” in Boston at the national meeting of the American Association of Italian Teachers, as well as chairing a session on medieval literature there. In addition, Mazzocco was chosen as one of a small number of international scholars to honor the late Paul Oskar Kristeller at the upcoming conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Chicago.

Mazzocco's contribution, titled “Kristeller and the Italian Vernacular,” will also be included in the volume honoring Kristeller, the foremost scholar of the Italian Renaissance of the twentieth century. Mazzocco's article “The Italian Connection in Juan de Valdés's Diálogo de la Lengua,” previously published in Historiographia Linguistica, vol. XXIV, no. 3, 1997, was selected to be reprinted in an important volume of essays on Spanish historical linguistics titled History of Linguistics in Spain/ Historia de la Lingüística en España II (eds. H-J Niederehe and E. F. K. Koerner, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamin Press). Mazzocco also wrote an entry on Juan de Valdés, which is slated to appear in the new Biographical Dictionary of Western Linguistics published by Routledge Press in London. In addition, an article, coauthored with Elizabeth Mazzocco, “Boccaccio and Renaissance Italian Comedy” was published in December 2000 in Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio's Decameron, a volume in the Modern Language Association of America's series Approaches to Teaching World Literature.

Mazzocco also published two lengthy entries in the Dante Encyclopedia, the first in the English language, which also features illustrations throughout its 1,006 pages from MHC's Valentine Giamatti Dante Collection of illustrated editions of Dante's Divine Comedy that Mazzocco brought to the attention of the editor. In addition, he found time to review a manuscript for the University of Toronto Press and write a book review for the Renaissance Quarterly, not to mention continue work on his book-in-progress, A Reappraisal of Renaissance Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Italy.