"An ambitious new intellectual history of Italy that convincingly returns Petrarch and Petrarchism to a position of centrality, this book offers a powerful and generative account of the Italian tradition as a process of 'tradition making.' With innovative accounts of such seminal figures as Vico, Goldoni, De Sanctis, and Croce, Rubini demonstrates how, across time, a concern with the shared past has shaped Italian thought and opened new possibilities for the future."
 

Jurors' citation | 2022 AAIS Book Prize, first prize for History, Society, and Politics

"Posterity should spark an ongoing conversation about the past, present, and future of Renaissance letters, and no doubt its author would find this conversation in keeping with his message."

Intellectual History Review

"Rubini’s Posterity brilliantly questions the presumption that traditions are retrospectively invented, by instead exploring the control certain Italian writers exerted over their own legacies. . . . Rubini strives not just to comprehend how traditions develop but also to remark on the conscious efforts made to transfer and reformulate traditions across time. . . . A remarkable study."

MLN (Modern Language Notes)

"Posterity as a whole tackles the relationship between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, their respective places in history, and, most importantly, what that means for an Italian intellectual tradition today. Rubini effectively illustrates the hermeneutical relationship between reader and author, who, in the practice of humanism, are one and the same."

Italica

"Rubini traces the 'historical continuity' of humanism, which he equates with Petrarchism through the work of seemingly disparate Italian thinkers from the 14th through the 20th centuries. . . Classified under Italian history in the Library of Congress system, this interdisciplinary volume defies categorization and will interest scholars working on Italian literary, cultural, or Renaissance studies, as well as history, philosophy, and theater."

Choice

"Rubini is clearly one of the best young scholars of the 'Italian tradition.' His first book had already made it clear, the second confirms it. . . . No one feels so 'already judged' by posterity as the Italian intellectuals, who until yesterday were unable to conceive of radical epistemological break-ups between the tradition that nourished them and the present in which they live. This feature of Italy’s cultural history makes it possible for Rubini to lay out a genealogy that goes retroactively from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to Petrarch’s Familiares and Seniles, by means of Croce’s autobiographical writings and De Sanctis’s entire output."

European Legacy

"Posterity represents a greatly welcome addition to the recently reinvigorated field of Italian intellectual history. . . . This excellent reconstruction of the invention of Italian intellectual tradition helps us understand the key features of the work of modern Italian intellectuals and their engagement with their historical craft. The intricate intersections between text, historical process, historical writing and autobiography are clarified while we learn more about the ‘translatability’ of these Italian intellectuals and their story. This book leaves us with questions for the future regarding the role of the historical context and the political dimension of these intellectual endeavours, and will greatly influence future debates around the making of the Italian intellectual tradition."

History of European Ideas

“…a veritable x-ray of Italian intellectual life…The humanist tradition [in Rubini’s telling] is also a militant one, constantly shaped by history’s fits and starts, forged from conflicts and frictions, and projected towards the future with the aim of fulfilling the humanistic project of the total, comprehensive transformation of humankind.”

Italian Culture (translated from Italian)

"[Posterity’s] goal is not at all that of simply 'recovering the past,' no matter how preeminent such a past may have been. . . . Its aim is rather to investigate . . . the invention of tradition as such. Traditions are not found, they are not explored, nor are they appraised the way some historians are wont to do: they can only be invented.”    

Forum Italicum (translated from Italian)

"In five interwoven chapters, Rubini analyzes five different authors: Petrarch, Francesco De Sanctis, Carlo Goldoni, Giambattista Vico, and finally Antonio Gramsci, specifically in relation to Benedetto Croce. His interpretative approach is based on a rich conception of how each thinker addressed the entire temporal horizon of the intellectual tradition. Drawing heavily on autobiographies and letters, Rubini shows how Italian authors reassessed the origins of humanism in the past, engaged in conversation with contemporaries in the present, and deliberately wrote to influence audiences in the future. This last point gives the work its title: Posterity. . . . By taking seriously the human dimension of these relationships, Rubini gives a dramatic and insightful, but also grounded, picture of what these authors understood their role in the metanarrative of Italian thought to be."

Quaderni d'Italianistica

“Rubini is remarkable in his double competence, both as a historian of literary art who is sensitive to aesthetic creation and as an intellectual historian who defines novel trends and modes of inquiry practices. With considerable ingenuity, Rubini describes the autobiographical as defining Italian Humanism, drawing a distinction between Humanism as inquiry and Renaissance as domain.”

Nancy S. Struever, Johns Hopkins University

“Posterity is commendable for the constellation of authors it proposes, presenting the reader with unexpected combinations and drawing new trajectories from author to author. Rubini impressively combines different readings and introduces canonical Italian figures in the global debate. This is a work that will appeal to intellectual historians and scholars of Italy across many disciplines.”

Eleonora Stoppino, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“This marvelous book explores intricate links between Petrarchan hermeneutics and Renaissance humanism, as well as the endurance and adaptability of both to modern and postmodern thought. Its argument unfolds as an adventure of transhistorical magnitude, propelling the past into the present and beyond to the future with powerful effect. Rubini everywhere brings passion and enthusiasm to bear upon analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary theory and practice.”

William J. Kennedy, Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Cornell University

“Beginning with a bravura reinterpretation of Petrarch and his place in literary history, Rubini suggests that reciprocity between reading and writing, interpreter and object of interpretation, present and past—serves as the key element allowing literature to live and thus to become more than soul-deadening antiquarianism. For Rubini, Petrarch foresaw that posterity would allow continual interpretation and reinterpretation of his work, pointing toward a future in which later interpreters would reveal more about (and draw more from) his work than his contemporaries ever could do. It is a provocative, timely, and fascinating book.”

Christopher S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University