The Vichian Resurrection of Commedia dell’Arte: Michelet, Sand, and De Sanctis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay seeks to reconnect two intellectual events of major import in nineteenth-century France: Jules Michelet’s “rediscovery” of Giambattista Vico as a viable source for a critical review of modernity’s task and the scholarly, artistic, and moral accreditation of commedia dell’arte, something inaugurated by George and Maurice Sand in their landmark Masques at bouffons (1860). Together, I contend, these scholarly events mark turning points in the romantic revision of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment legacies. In the first section of this essay, I examine Michelet’s Vichian obsession, itself so often studied in isolation, to account for its hybridization with a specific brand of Italian Vichianism imported to France by Italian Risorgimento expatriates. As I explore in the second part of the essay, this connection informs the Sands’ recuperation of commedia dell’arte, another important part of Italy’s early modern legacy, as itself a Vichian event mediated by Michelet’s historiography. In conclusion, this rapprochement will allow us to elucidate a larger reciprocation between French and Italian thinkers at the same time that Italians were reckoning with the legacy of the Risorgimento, as we see through the eyes of one of its major proponents, Francesco De Sanctis, who in his influential History of Italian literature (1870–1) reappropriated Vico to argue that the rebirth of Italy may depend on the obliteration of both its Renaissance and comic traditions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".