James Calum O'Neill is a literary and art historian specialising in Italian medieval and Renaissance literature, fine art and architecture. His PhD was conducted at Durham University on 'Self-Transformation in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili' which is now published by Routledge under the title The Allegory of Love in the Early Renaissance: Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and its European Context. Currently, O'Neill's research focuses on botanical, architectural, antiquarian and narratological analysis in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as a locus for the convergence of philosophic, elegiac, antiquarian and medical traditions, pertaining to both medieval and humanist cultures, with a focus on northern Italian and Venetian society during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Thresholds of Transformation

2. Self-transformation and Architecture

3. Poliphilo, Connoisseurship and Self-transformation

4. Travel Writing and Topographical Interiority

5. Walking and Self-transformation in the Gardens of Eleuterylida and Telosia

6. Love and Self-transformation in Book I

7. Lovesickness, Honestum, and Initiation in Book II

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index