Historia corporis humani sive Anatomice. Alessandro Benedetti , Giovanna Ferrari
The argument is so involved in details that it ignores issues. For another example, it takes Augustine's reading of the Psalms as typical of his reading of the Bible and his reading of the Bible as paradigmatic of his reading in general. It considers how Petrarch guided his own reading of the Psalms by Augustine's exegesis. Despite a vital concern with philology, it does not question their mutual use of a translation. Yet the authenticity of die text, especially the Bible, was a hallmark of humanism. The remark that Augustine had to learn to read the Old Testament not literally but spiritually misses die fact that he could not read it literally because he did not^know Hebrew. Augustine's citation of the "sweet" verse that "brothers live together as one" (45) grossly mistranslates the Hebrew, "God gives the lonely a home" (Ps. 67:7). This grammatical mistake had existential import, since Augustine canonized this misreading as the prime precept of his monastic Rule, which many religious orders not only read but lived. Humanist scholars endured persecution to render the Hebrew text as preferable to the Septuagint and Vulgate translations. How does Augustine's ignorance and Petrarch's imitation of it relate to humanism? The book does recognize some differences in the textual practices of Augustine and Petrarch and some differences between the historical and the constructed Augustines. It conscientiously documents these; for example, it explains polemical quotations taken out of context. But its particulars are too myopic of the general distinction, intellectual and methodological, to understand Petrarch's humanism definitively. Bracketing its failures at comparison, Rereading the Renaissance still offers many worthwhile observations and insights on Petrarch's textual practices in prose. Especially interesting is its interpretation of his Secretum. A revised thesis, the book is very academic in its definition, method, and style. Although it sets its agendum from theories, it is most mature in the interpretation of texts.