L’Histoire de deux amants de Piccolomini (1444) : humanisme et mise en question de l’exemplarité antique

Abstract

Piccolomini’s pedagogical treatise De liberorum educatione (1450) is typical of the humanist practices and ways of writing. On the contrary, the Historia de duobus amantibus, a love fiction written in latin, introduces two young people who seem to embody the humanist culture by their eloquence and their knowledge of classics. But by paying attention to the narration and the characters’ rhetoric, the paper focuses on Piccolomini’s irony against the humanist idea of Antiquity as source of exemplarity for the modernity.

Keywords

• humanism
• Piccolomini
• exemplarity
• exemplum
• rhetoric
• education