“There is, in my opinion, a tendency to sequester the modern period and to assume for it a greater conceptual novelty than it merits. History being the unmarked continuum that it is, our attempts to “discretize the continuum,” as scientists put it in a metaphor that I borrow out of proper context, are bound to be subject to endless pushings of the (invented) boundaries forward and back and the privileging of our own time is to be expected. Let me say for the record, however, that in my experience the great texts of the early Italian tradition can be trusted to generate every kind of question pertinent to the human condition, and that we rarely surprise a Dante, a Petrarch, or a Boccaccio with a question that he did not ask himself.“
-Teodolinda Barolini
