From the «gran secolo» to the Grand siècle. The Codification and the Fortune of the Italian Renaissance Model in La conversazione by Amedeo Quondam

Abstract

This essay analyzes Amedeo Quondam’s book La conversazione. Un modello italiano (Rome, Donzelli, 2007). On the one hand, it highlights some fundamental aspects of the book, in terms of content, style and methodology. On the other hand, it offers a concise contextualization of the text, both in relation to the large amount of Quondam’s studies and publications concerning the moral literature during the Renaissance and the age of humanism, and in relation to modern and contemporary historiography which is often blurred or disappointing. This demonstrates the originality and the evocative power of the book, even on a narrative level, as the result of a decades long cursus studiorum; Quondam’s work is also a stimulus for deeper insights.