Margaret Meserve is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Humanities and Faculty Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Marcello Simonetta is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Wesleyan University.
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the Sienese humanist who became Pope
Pius II, describes the election that brought him to the papal
throne in a cold, mordant key that anticipates the Italian styles
of Machiavelli and Guicciardini...For all his severity, Pius had a
delightful way of describing cities and countryside. He could mock
himself charmingly, as when he described his stay among the
barbarian inhabitants of the British borders, who had never seen
wine or white bread, and whose eager young women he refused to
sleep with, as he stayed up all night for fear of bandits "among
the heifers and nanny goats, who kept him from sleeping a wink by
stealthily pulling the straw from his pallet." Pius's Commentaries,
presented in a most elegant and informative way by Margaret Meserve
and Marcello Simonetta, may well be the most entertaining work in
the whole [I Tatti Renaissance Library] series.
*New York Review of Books*
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