‘Il nostro medio evo è rinascimento latino’: Giosuè Carducci’s Theory of Literary History

This article examines Giosuè Carducci’s theory of literary history, placing it at the intersection of Renaissance humanism, Romantic nationalism and his own classicist orientation. These three contexts shaped his interpretation of the Italian Middle Ages as a Latin Renaissance, in which the revival of Roman traditions and humanist scholarship provided the basis for cultural continuity. Carducci’s stance towards Romanticism was notably ambivalent: he drew on its nationalist emphasis on the people’s spirit while rejecting its medievalism and preference for vernacular literature. Instead, he affirmed the role of humanist Latin as central to Italy’s literary identity. His vision of literary history valorised the symbolic year 1000 as a moment of rebirth, Petrarch as a secular prophet of renewal and fifteenth-century book hunters as cultural pioneers. Through this synthesis, Carducci advanced a historiographical model that legitimised his own classicist commitments and positioned humanism as a remedy for modern fragmentation.