Education, Civic Virtue, and Colonialism in Fifteenth-Century Italy: The Ogdoas of Alberto Alfieri

The Ogdoas, a series of dialogues about proper rulership, true nobility, and the afterlife, take place between deceased members of the Visconti family of Milan and one Adorno of Genoa, in a sort of Christian/Pagan Limbo. Written c. 1420 by the otherwise unknown Alberto Alfieri, who was serving at the time as schoolmaster of the Genoese colony of Caffa on the Black Sea, the dialogues are an interesting mirror of political and cultural self-consciousness in the early Renaissance. Originally written in Latin, the Ogdoas is known only in one manuscript and has never before been translated into any modern language.

Edited and Translated with an Introduction by Carla P. Weinberg (University of the Arts) and E. Ann Matter (University of Pennsylvania)