Петото поколение: vivo indignants
The Fifth Generation: vivo indignants

Summary/Abstract: The most important intuition of Renaissance people is the understanding of time as a loss. The purpose of this article is to inquire into the late post-history of the ancient myth of the five (or four) generations. We have studied various specific forms which the familiar story can assume in Renaissance texts. Our concern is mainly with the Renaissance Latin poetry - Petrarca's verse letters or the Silvae of Angelo Poliziano, the humanistic critics of history and literature - so the treatises of Jean Bodin and Julius Caesar Scaliger - and the Renaissance comments on the relevant passages in Hesiod's Works and Days and Ovid's Metamorphoses. All these texts are remarkable for the ingenuity of their answers concerning the human fate and the succession of ages of world history as a steady decay or as a progress.

• Details
• Contents