'Rewriting' is one of the most crucial but at the same time one of the most elusive concepts of
literary scholarship. In order to contribute to a further reassessment of such a notion this
volume investigates a wide range of medieval and early modern literary transformations
especially focusing on texts (and contexts) of Italian and French Renaissance literature. The
first section of the book Rewriting gathers essays which examine medieval and early modern
rewritings while also pointing out the theoretical implications raised by such texts. The
second part Rewritings in Early Modern Literature collects contributions which account for
different practices of rewriting in the Italian and French Renaissance for instance by
analysing dynamics of repetition and duplication verbatim reproduction and free reworking
textual production and authorial self-fashioning alterity and identity replication and
multiplication. The volume strives at shedding light on the complexity of the relationship
between early modern and ancient literature perfectly summed up in the motto written by Pietro
Aretino in a letter to his friend the painter Giulio Romano in 1542: Essere modernamente
antichi e anticamente moderni.
