This is a very interesting book,with selections (in Italian and in English translation) from great Italian writers, artists, scientists and politicians from the 1200's-1600's. It deserves to be better known. However, it is unevenly legible, varying from highly legible to the sloppiest Optical Character Recognition scan I have ever seen.

NOTE: This book does NOT appear to be at all redundant with "Selections from the Italian prose writers with critical introductions by Ernesto Grillo, D. LITT. Published 1917", also on Open Library. COULD SOMEONE PLEASE RECONCILE THE TITLES?

The text itself is of considerable interest to two groups of readers: anyone interested in then-contemporary accounts by and about great minds of the Italian Renaissance, either in English translation or in the original; or anyone who wishes to improve their (pre-modern) Italian while reading some of the great Italian writers, artists, scientists, etc., active prior to 1827, when it was published.

There are selections from Boccaccio's Decamerone; Machiavelle's Istorie Fiorentina; Castiglione's Il Cortigiano; Vasari's account of Michaelangelo (here spelled Michelagnolo) at the Court of Giulio II; and letters of Galileo. Other selections are by writers less familiar to us, but of considerable interest.

A piece about the Sack of Rome is by the Renaissance political writer Guicciardini, a friend and critic of Machiavelli's. Wikipedia describes Guicciardini as having "paved the way for a new style in historiography, with his use of government sources to support arguments and the realistic analysis of the people and events of his time". To read the lessons which a cogent Renaissance politico drew from the Fall of Rome is to understand both periods better, as well as to see a thoughtful person doing just what we readers are doing: looking back at the past to better understand our present.

(Note that many of the familiar names were spelled in a way that is unfamiliar to us;Italian spelling had apparently not yet been standardized, or perhaps these are renderings from Italy's many dialects.)

The "double translation" method employed, described as "Hamiltonian", is interesting in itself. In the latter part of the book, the Italian texts are translated into English, with each sentence rendered twice: once quite literally, the other in idiomatic English of the period. It was intended as a teaching text, and the method itself is of some interest to those concerned with teaching foreign languages and with translation.

Markings show that the original volume is from the Bodleian Library, Oxford's main research library, and one of the oldest in Europe.

As noted above, the digitization was done poorly and unevenly. Some pages are clearly legible; others are so poorly digitized that it is difficult to discern which alphabet was used. Still others have a whited out area obscuring much of the page, where a piece of opaque paper, apparently inadvertently, covered part of the text. It really deserves to be re-done properly.I am concerned that this book may now be considered to have had its contents "preserved" since it has been digitized. But much of it is not readable (though still worth reading if this subject interests you). I fear that this may happen to more books as collections are digitized. (Nicholson Baker's book, "Double Fold", describes how a similarly unfounded confidence has led librarians to toss out entire newspaper archives, in the belief that once digitized or microfilmed, the originals were now redundant.) I am deeply, deeply grateful for the digitization of text, and the unprecedented potential for access it provides. But digitization creates a responsibility to avoid false assurance that the text is now accurately and legibly preserved.

But I am grateful to have found this book, and Open Library. This is an interesting and unusual book which deserves to be read again.