Intellectual Networks
Jane Everson highlights the social networks of the Italian academies, the first of their kind in Renaissance Europe.
Their members were literati and men of erudition, all of them completely idle intellectually, and ready to write in verse or prose on any subject, however frivolous, for their amusement. … The names of these academies and academicians sound strangely in our ears today: the Impastato [the Doughy One], the Raggirato [the Swindled One], the Propagginato [the Propagated one], the Smarrito [the Lost and Strayed], and the like. And the members recited their talks, or as they called them, their ‘prattlings’ on salads, on cakes, on hypochondria … they sang of the vulgarest things and often the dirtiest.
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