Jordi Alonso

Using a newly identified manuscript, the "Rhetorica" (APUG 1257) of Ubertino Carrara, this project centres on a 71-folio seventeenth-century Latin treatise that survives, so far, as a unique exemplar. Preserved as a fair-copy teaching manuscript, it documents a working classroom shaped by the Ratio Studiorum, the Jesuit plan of studies, while revealing practices otherwise absent from printed sources. In this text, Carrara integrates Italian vernacular poetry into a traditionally classical curriculum, placing Petrarch, Sannazaro, and Ariosto alongside Virgil and Cicero, and embedding his own revised verses within discussions of the Italus vates (“Italian poet”). This monograph argues that the "Rhetorica" functions like Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia: a Latin treatise legitimizing the vernacular. It is a hinge text of pedagogy, canon formation, and self-fashioning that anticipates Romantic and Risorgimento visions of poets as national voices.