"Discussing Matter and Evil in the Pseudo-Clementines - In Search of the True Christian Philosopher and His/Her Network? (Lectio International Conference: Networking through Biography, 7-9 December 2022, KULeuven) (original) (raw)
Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 2009
The elites of Renaissance Poland were, as generations of Polish historians have been since, extremely proud of their country's humanist credentials, seeing these as evidence of its cultural sophistication, vigorous links with Italy and robustly European historical identity. Standard Polish histories of the University of Kraków (f. 1364) without hesitation define the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as a time of humanist ascendancy at the institution. For Henryk Barycz (1935), this was "the age of humanism" in the Polish capital, while for Józef Garbacik (1964) it was the point at which the university became "a crucible of Renaissance learning and culture." 1 If the early sixteenth century was Poland's much-vaunted "Golden Age," a moment of dynastic triumph and geopolitical expansion under Zygmunt I Jagiellon (1506-1548), this must in turn, so the argument goes, have been accompanied by an appropriate artistic and intellectual flowering. Since the University of Kraków occupied an almost iconic status in Polish national historiography of the Renaissance, the city's claims to be a hotbed of humanism have rarely been subjected to serious criticism or challenge. Patronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons approaches the question of humanism both at Kraków and other cities in the Jagiellonian bloc from a new and fruitful angle, asking how hospitable international humanists really found these towns and courts. A scholar of Polish neo-Latin literature, Glomski takes as her subject three foreign humanists who travelled to Kraków in search of income, employment and glory-in short, patronage. The men trying "to convert themselves from outsiders to insiders," Rudolf Agricola Junior (ca. 1490-1521), Valentin Eck (1494-1556?) and Leonard Cox (ca. 1495ca. 1549), are identified by Glomski as the most prolific of the itinerant humanists active in early sixteenth-century Kraków, whose hagiographic verse, panegyric poetry, dedicatory letters, orations, and treatises on subjects as diverse as marriage and crusading passed through the printing presses of Johannes Haller,
Living in a World of Words: humanist friendships and book culture in Quattrocento Rome, 1440-1480.
2024
This dissertation examines the friendships and social networks of some of the humanist scholars who lived and worked in Rome in the decades between 1440 and 1480. By studying their friendships and community formations as a social process, and how they interacted with each other through exchanging books as gifts, I show that the humanists in Rome relied upon their friendships and networks to support their academic works and lives. Their intellectual production, praised and analyzed for their contributions to many avenues of political, cultural, and philosophical history, was buttressed and supported not just by their patrons or their contributions to intellectual culture, but also by the many socio-cultural habits and behaviours of premodern friendships, rivalries, and networks. By narrating some of these friendships and taking a microhistorical lens to humanist life and behaviour, this dissertation argues for the importance of studying humanism as a lived practice and a performance in early modernity, rather than only as an intellectual movement that was obsessed with the transformation of classical antiquity in and for their world. The first chapter grounds this dissertation within the long histories of both intellectual and social history of early modern Italy and highlights a path forward for the study of fifteenth-century humanism. The second chapter studies the humanist genre of the dedicatory letter from a social perspective, and using two examples, argues that this famous genre of humanist writing should also be studied for how it builds, shapes, and informs humanist communities, and not just for how humanists used prefaces to seek patronage. The third chapter studies the printed prefaces of the humanist bishop Giovanni Andrea Bussi, and how he brokered and negotiated the communities of scholars, elites, and humanism itself in mid-fifteenth-century Rome through his prefaces, his editing, and his work with the printers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. The last chapter looks at the creation of Pius II’s famous memoir, The Commentaries, as a humanist and political text, arguing that there were many authors involved in the creation of its manuscripts and planned circulation. Subsequently, the pope planned for its multiple authorship and coordinated its many hands and voices to create a singular image of himself that could be used and defended by his associates after his death.
This essay explores how books and letters functioned as complementary media in the early modern scholarly information order, using Athanasius Kircher as a case study. In opposition to recent claims that Kircher was a marginal figure in the “Republic of Letters,” I show that Kircher developed a sophisticated system for disseminating knowledge to an international, multi- confessional audience, which depended on the coordinated use of private letters and publication. While many studies of the Republic of Letters assume that the reciprocal exchange of information with a diverse group of correspondents was a uniquely effective method for facilitating the circulation of knowledge, the example of Kircher shows the important role played by "boundary spanners," who linked groups that would otherwise have been isolated. The essay offers a corrective to a tendency in recent scholarship that overemphasizes correspondence at the expense of printed books, and sounds a note of caution about the limitations of new digital methods of visualizing correspondence networks.
After the Reformation began in 1517, Protestant ideas soon crossed the Alps and spread out of Italian cities, fascinating (especially, but not exclusively) the humanists and scholars who were part of the late-Renaissance intellectual environment. In particular, between the 1530s and the 1590s a great number of Italian physicians absorbed, promoted, and re-elaborated, often in radical terms, the reformed and heretical discourse. In this article I am presenting some research perspectives and methodological challenges concerning the application of social network research and digital humanities tools to the history of 16th-century religious dissent. In particular, I will discuss and examine the reconstruction, out of a sample of 200 cases, of a network of dissident physicians who faced religious repression and opposed dogmatic confessional boundaries in Italy, and in their European diaspora, as a part of my own ongoing interdisciplinary research.
The highs and lows of biography1 This paper seeks to situate the Historia Augusta in its literary context and to understand its imposture as a literary play with the value judgements on the reading and writing of biography that were current in the fourth century. Drawing on evidence from fragmentary historians, I shall, first, survey how political biography was perceived in this period. In particular, I shall draw attention to a recurring negative assessment of the genre as unsuited for an elite habitus. In the second section of this paper, I shall argue that the Historia Augusta plays on these value judgements by inviting its reader to become an 'over-reader' 2 who is aware of the distance between the'real author' of the work and the 'implied authors'.3 1. « They hate learning as poison »: biography and the elite habitus in the fourth century The field of biography in the fourth century was somewhat more crowded than we tend to assume. In this section I shall discuss some evidence which is rarely adduced in this context, with the aim of identifying a discourse on biography against which the Historia Augusta positions itself. The Historia Augusta seems to situate itself within the context of the confluence of historiography and biography which started in the Empire and was practised in the fourth century by the Ennmansche Kaisergeschichte, Eutropius, Aurelius Victor and the Epitome de Caesaribus.4 As the Historia Augusta has clear links with such works, often through their use as sources, this is an obvious way to understand the work. Yet, this is only part of the story. If we look at the reception of works of biography that were produced or used in this period, we notice that political biography did not have the sound reputation that its continuous history seems to suggest. (I restrict myself to biography of 'political figures', thus leaving out lives of saints, philosophers, and authors. This may generate issues about genre definition, but, as we shall see, political biography does seem to be identified as a particular type of literature.) I shall first illustrate the obvious fact that works of biography were a traditional tool in the literary training of the elite by the grammaticus and rhetor and that compendia collecting biographical material were produced for such a purpose. Then I shall argue that because of their association with basic training, works of biography tended to be judged rather negatively, but this was not the only reason: there was also the suspicion that biography was being read out of misplaced curiosity. Finally, because political biography, and in particular imperial biography, was a trite genre, we notice a tendency in the fourth century to engage with such traditional knowledge in a new, playful manner.
This report explores the use of menologies, the calendars of saints for the entire year that are often appended to medieval gospel and apostolus manuscripts, as a tool for clustering the manuscripts and formulating hypotheses about textual transmission and diffusion. We regard manuscripts that share calendar entries (i.e., commemorate the same saints or holy events on the same dates) as analogous to people in the modern world who share Facebook friends, and we employ social network software to examine these networks of "friendships." 1
Viator, 2008
This article concentrates on the relation between the writing of hagiographical texts about Saint Bononius (d. 1026) and their actual political, social, and religious contexts in the diocese of Vercelli. Bononius's cult came into existence at one of the crucial turning points in the history of the medieval Italy, when the structures of central government handed down from the Carolingian age were breaking down and new local centers of power were taking their place. Vercelli had traditionally held a privileged position in the German emperors' Italian policy, but as a consequence the agitation connected to the remodeling of society was more violent here than in many other regions of regnum Italiae. In this situation Arderic, the bishop of Vercelli, seems to have sought reconciliation with the local anti-imperial aristocracy, and it appears that the cult of Saint Bononius played a major role in the bishop's conciliatory politics. The author argues that Arderic used the cult to heal the wounds resulting from tumultuous recent history in two ways. First, references to the painful events of recent history, in which Bononius had also been involved, were omitted from the hagiographical texts and attention was directed to the less inflammatory aspects of the saint's life. Second, the saint was represented in the texts as an arbitrator between adversaries, protector of the powerless, and one who appeased the anger and the arrogance of the powerful. Thus, the article is directly connected to the discussion on the role of the literacy in the ways in which the societies of the medieval West contemplated their past, thus shaping their identity and their perception of the present.
Renaissance Quarterly
This article explores Poggio Bracciolini's letters to Niccolò Niccoli from a variety of perspectives: it looks at what imitation meant for Poggio, examines the letters’ commentary on the manuscript culture of the early Quattrocento, discusses Poggio's efforts to craft a personal voice, and traces the interplay of optimism and pessimism in the letters, an interplay common to humanist texts of this period. By bringing together these different perspectives, the article articulates the range of ways in which one scholar used his epistolary collection to shape his own persona, connect himself to Ciceronian precedents, and create norms and expectations for a developing intellectual community.