[794] Perhaps one of the strongest passages, Orlandino, cap. v. str. 54-58. The tranquil and unlearned Vesp. Bisticci says (Comm. sulla vita di Giov. Manetti, p. 96): ‘Sono due ispezie di uomini difficili a supportare per la loro ignoranza; l’una sono i servi, la seconda i contadini.’
[795] In Lombardy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the nobles did not shrink from dancing, wrestling, leaping, and racing with the peasants. Il Cortigiano, l. ii. fol. 54. A. Pandolfini (L. B. Alberti) in the Trattato del governo della famiglia, p. 86, is an instance of a land-owner who consoles himself for the greed and fraud of his peasant tenantry with the reflection that he is thereby taught to bear and deal with his fellow-creatures.
[796] Jovian. Pontan. De fortitudine, lib. ii.
[797] The famous peasant-woman of the Valtellina—Bona Lombarda, wife of the Condottiere Pietro Brunoro—is known to us from Jacobus Bergomensis and from Porcellius, in Murat. xxv. col. 43.
[798] On the condition of the Italian peasantry in general, and especially of the details of that condition in several provinces, we are unable to particularise more fully. The proportions between freehold and leasehold property, and the burdens laid on each in comparison with those borne at the present time, must be gathered from special works which we have not had the opportunity of consulting. In stormy times the country people were apt to have appalling relapses into savagery (Arch. Stor. xvi. i. pp. 451 sqq., ad. a. 1440; Corio, fol. 259; Annales Foroliv. in Murat. xxii. col. 227, though nothing in the shape of a general peasants’ war occurred. The rising near Piacenza in 1462 was of some importance and interest. Comp. Corio, Storia di Milano, fol. 409; Annales Placent. in Murat. xx. col. 907; Sismondi, x. p. 138. See below, part vi. cap. 1.
[799] F. Bapt. Mantuani Bucolica seu Adolescentia in decem Eclogas divisa; often printed, e.g. Strasburg, 1504. The date of composition is indicated by the preface, written in 1498, from which it also appears that the ninth and tenth eclogues were added later. In the heading to the tenth are the words, ‘post religionis ingressum;’ in that of the seventh, ‘cum jam autor ad religionem aspiraret.’ The eclogues by no means deal exclusively with peasant life; in fact, only two of them do so—the sixth, ‘disceptatione rusticorum et civium,’ in which the writer sides with the rustics; and the eighth, ‘de rusticorum religione.’ The others speak of love, of the relations between poets and wealthy men, of conversion to religion, and of the manners of the Roman court.
[800] Poesie di Lorenzo Magnifico, i. p. 37 sqq. The remarkable poems belonging to the period of the German ‘Minnesänger,’ which bear the name of Neithard von Reuenthal, only depict peasant life in so far as the knight chooses to mix with it for his amusement. The peasants reply to the ridicule of Reuenthal in songs of their own. Comp. Karl Schroder, Die höfische Dorfpoesie des deutschen Mittelalters in Rich. Gosche, Jahrb. für Literaturgesch. 1 vol. Berlin, 1875, pp. 45-98, esp. 75 sqq.
[801] Poesie di Lor. Magn. ii. 149.
[802] In the Deliciae poetar. ital., and in the works of Politian. First separate ed. Florence, 1493. The didactic poem of Rucellai, Le Api, first printed 1519, and La coltivazione, Paris, 1546, contain something of the same kind.
[803] Poesie di Lor. Magnifico, ii. 75.