De Mundo Non Curare and Other Lies: Academic Rebirth in 16th-Century Siena

In honor of John Marino, this paper outlines how his path-breaking work on the court of Naples can illuminate the complexities of civic and ritual life in an entirely different setting. From the foundation of the Academy of the Intronati of Siena in 1525, the noble male members sought to shape their civic landscape through the clever use of games and various academic activities. After the fall of Siena in 1555, the academy's playful nature helped to disguise the more serious, and challenging, aspects of their pursuits. Hiding under their guiding precept, to care nothing of the world, they feigned to do just that. Instead, they found ways to assert their superiority as they refocused their attentions away from the Republic and towards the republic of the mind that their academy represented. This was not a unique phenomenon. With the widespread fall of Italian city-states in the 15th and 16th centuries, institutions such as academies, themselves resurrected from ancient times, blossomed to take the place of the fallen states. In Siena alone, the Intronati was just one of many academies that rose to fill the void caused by political collapse. This paper will demonstrate how one literary academy rejected traditional notions of patriarchal republicanism and formed a new model for nobility based on academic merit and rhetorical skill through academic forums. John Marino blazed the trail for studies such as this. He forced historians to look beyond those well-examined cities of Florence, Venice, and Rome, to consider the entire world of Renaissance Italy, not just its traditional centers. In Naples, he found that games, like stories, functioned not only to relieve boredom but also to regulate social interactions and as a form of communication in their own right. In Siena, too, academies and their games had important disciplining functions.