Andrea Rizzi is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2014-2018) at The University of Melbourne, and an Associate Investigator at CHE. He is early modern history and literature scholar with an interdisciplinary approach to the study of this significant period of European culture: having been trained as a philologist as an undergraduate student at the University of Pavia (Italy), he then developed a focus on the transmission and tradition of historical Latin texts throughout the Italian Renaissance. His PhD concerned the translations of histories at the Ferrarese court of Duke Ercole I. Cultural history, literature, and translation studies are therefore the three interconnected streams of Andrea's research. His published research on the political and cultural influence of early modern translators established him as a nationally internationally-renowned scholar. In particular, his 2008 book on Matteo Maria Boiardo's translation from medieval Latin takes an innovative approach to the study of early modern translators; far beyond traditional views, it argues that these translators were seen as authors shaping the political and cultural thought and decision-making of contemporary rulers. This book shows translators as key players at court.
Andrea's ongoing research explores the strongly political implications of translation, and the role played by the early modern translator in the successful communication of political propaganda. As a natural progression from these studies, Rizzi's most recent research addresses far-reaching questions about translations and their early modern authors: what did it mean for Renaissance authors and their patrons to translate? Why was translation considered so important that Renaissance patrons, leaders, and printers invested considerable amounts of money and effort into the production and dissemination of translations? Historians of the Renaissance so far have not exploited to significant effect the resources that the Renaissance for sustained exploration of these questions. These are the questions and critical issues my completed monograph on translation in fifteenth-century Italy addressed but Rizzi intends to take this investigation further by exploring in the proposed project the same questions in the sixteenth century. For his project as CHE AI, Andrea will explore the conventions and reception of violent language in early fifteenth-century Latin literature.
Contact
arizzi@unimelb.edu.au
University of Melbourne staff profile
Academia.Edu Profile
Research
Violent Language in Renaissance Italy
Relevant publications
Rizzi, A. and E. Horodowich. ‘Rocking the Boat: Language and Identity on the Early Modern Gondola’. In City, Court, Academy: Language Choice in Early Modern Italy, edited by E. Del Soldato and A. Rizzi, pp. 13‒30. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018.
Rizzi, A. ‘Humanism’. In Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, edited by S. Broomhall, pp. 248‒51. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.
Rizzi, A. 'The Choices of Quattrocento Translators'. In Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle: Essays in Honour of Gary Ianziti, edited by C. Callisen, pp. 19‒34. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
Rizzi, A. 'Leonardo Bruni and the shimmering facets of languages in early quattrocentro Florence'. I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 16. 1/2 (2013): 243‒56. University of Chicago Press.
Rizzi, A. and E. Del Soldato. 'Latin and vernacular in quattrocentro Florence and beyond: An introduction'. I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 16.1/2. (2013): 231‒42. University of Chicago Press.
Duché, V. and A. Rizzi. 'Le détour par l'Italie dans les relations entre France et Espagne: le cas de la Penitence d'amour'. La revue RHR: Reforme, Humanisme, Renaissance, Association d'Etudes sur la Renaissance, l'Humanisme et la Reforme 75.4 (2012): 107‒18.
Rizzi, A., M. Ghezzo and J. Melville-Jones. The Morosini Codex. Volume IV: Michele Steno (to 1407). Padua: Unipress, 2010.
