Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Fifteenth-century Perspectives on Ancient Sophists -- Speroni and the Sophists -- Speroni's Practice of Sophistic Rhetoric -- The Debate on Dante and Sophistic Poetry -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Two Trattatelli of Speroni for Sophistry -- Bibliography -- Index of Names.

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In Sperone Speroni and the Debate over Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance Teodoro Katinis mines a number of little or unstudied primary sources and offers the first book on the rebirth of ancient sophists in the Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Leonardo Bruni to Jacopo Mazzoni, with a focus on the Italian writer and philosopher Sperone Speroni (1500-1588). Katinis convincingly argues that Speroni is a unique case of an early modern thinker who explicitly rejected Plato's demonization and defended the public role of the sophistic rhetoric, which enhanced the debate over the sophistic arts and scepticism in a variety of fields and anticipated some of the most revolutionary modern thoughts.

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