Name Sesto Prete | ||
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Died June 15, 1991, Cagli, Italy Books Two humanistic anthologies, The Humanists and the Discovery of Printing Education University of Bologna (1945), University of Cologne (1944) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada | ||
Sesto Prete (September 27, 1919 in Montefiore dell'Aso - June 15, 1991 in Cagli, Italy) was an Italian-born American philologist and paleographer.
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Biography
Sesto Prete studied classical philology in Italy and Germany, graduating first in Cologne in 1944 with Gunther Jachmann presenting a thesis on the concept of humanitas in Roman comedy, and then in Bologna in 1945 with Pietro Ferrarino, discussing a thesis on the concept of "Liberalitas" in the Roman comedy.
Dr. Prete taught as a "Lecturer" in Latin at the University of Bologna (1946–1949) and as Professor of Latin and Greek at the high school of Forlì. In 1955 he was "Writer" (scriptor) in the Vatican Library. He then moved to the United States, where he was a Professor from 1956 to 1968 at Fordham University in New York. As Professor Emeritus, he then taught at The University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, until 1990.
Many of his studies and his publications relate to the text, tradition and good fortune of Plautus and especially Terentius. Among the Latin authors he has privileged the study of Ausonius but also of Cicero, Catullus, Virgilius, the two Plinius, Priscianus, Columella, Sidonius Apollinaris, Apuleius, Tertullianus and Cyprianus. He was specialized in the field of Medieval and Humanism. He has worked extensively on Ratherius and Innocentius III, Marco Polo, Dante and Petrarca. The Latin poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and especially the religious poetry of poets active in Ferrara and Urbino, and also Bruni, Poliziano, Tito Vespasiano Strozzi and Pontano, Giulio Cesare Scaligero and Guillaume du Bartas. He also studied some humanist thinkers like Pius II, Poggio and Valla, Phoebus Capella, Giacomo and Antonio Costanzi, Joachim Camerarius and Niccolò Perotti.
He was also the promoter and conference organizer, curator and director of acts of magazines. Due to his international activity he has been responsible for fostering relationships, comparison and exchange of ideas between various countries and especially between Italy, Germany and America. In 1978 he founded the magazine "Res Publica Litterarum. Studies in the Classical Tradition", which he directed until 1991.