Glad to Go for a Feast: Milton, Buonmattei, and the Florentine Accademici

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.