Anthony D'Elia works on the intellectual and social history of the Italian Renaissance, specializing in humanism, the history of the classical tradition, neo-Latin literature, rhetoric, political propaganda, war, masculinity, gender, sexuality, and women. His current book-project, The Soul of Sigismondo Malatesta: Pagan Virtue in Renaissance Italy explores humanist literature and art in the court of Sigismondo Malatesta (1417-1468), Lord of Rimini, as a limit case in the central problem of the Renaissance, whether the recovery and imitation of classical pagan literature and culture created a fundamental clash with Christian values in fifteenth-century Italy. Sigismondo was a flagrant example of the tension between high pagan culture and Christian society in the Renaissance. Sigismondo was notorious for his libido, his military conduct, and his disrespect for Christianity. By examining the pagan themes so prominent in his court literature, the book provides a fuller picture of an important Renaissance ruler, reveals the extent of the influence of classical pagan ideas, and explores the relationships and tensions between poetry and life. It complicates the idea of Renaissance by examining the extent to which pagan ideas permeated ethics and religious thought, influenced sexuality and gender relations, and affected the way Italians lived and saw their lives. Professor D'Elia's previous book, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome (Harvard University Press, 2009), focuses on an important episode in Renaissance history, when twenty intellectuals were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for over a year for plotting to murder Pope Paul II in 1468. The book begins with the plot, arrest, and torture of the humanists; then explores the possible causes of the conspiracy as revealed in the interrogation questions, including such different motives as Church reform, republicanism, paganism, homoeroticism and sodomy, and allying with the Turkish Sultan Mehmet II. The concluding chapters describe the pain, desperation, and loneliness that the humanists suffered in prison and the failure of pagan and Christian philosophy to console them. The book redefines humanism as a dynamic communal movement focused on the living word in dialogue, debate, and practice. His first book, The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Harvard University Press, 2004) explores how in advocating an ideal of marriage and sexuality, Italian humanists offered an alternative to Christian asceticism and prepared the ground for the Reformation's rejection of holy virginity. By focusing on ideas about marriage and the biographies of writers the book studies the ways that intellectuals in the Renaissance conceived of themselves, their families, and the society in which they lived. He has translated Bartolomeo Platina, Lives of the Popes, Volume One: Antiquity (Years 1 to 461 AD) (The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2008), and is working on Platina, Lives of the Renaissance Popes, for the same series. Professor D'Elia's next research project will explore the idea of Sparta in the Italian Renaissance. He will focus on Spartan masculine and feminine ideals, education, and politics, and how Renaissance Italians understood these often radically different ideas in their own historical contexts.
