"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)
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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.
Ad comunis epystole lectionem: Pan-Italian Familiaritas and Petrarch’s Community of Friends
Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts, and Expressions, 2014
In the epistolary mode of the familiar letter that Cicero had practiced and theorized, Petrarch begins Familiares XII.16 abruptly – in medias res – and employs a direct, informal address. “I wish to bring you together ["iungam vos," literally “join you”], O most illustrious men and pride of Florence and Naples, I wish to bring you together if you will permit me to do so and will not shudder at the touch of a friendly hand.” The first word of the letter, "iungam," gives us our first glimpse of the ways in which further along in this political letter the poet seeks to literalize the metaphor of community as a joining, a coming together, resulting in the convergence of two men into a single body, into a unique and ultimate identity, no longer separate, but united: one soul in bodies twain. In the letter that immediately follows (XII.17) Petrarch lays out the strategy employed to get them face to face to discuss the matter in such a way that would force them to engage in direct conversation and thus also to confront their common humanity, if not their common Italian identity: “I used a method whereby I sealed both men in a single letter so that they would at least have to meet in order to read it.” My focus here is on Petrarch’s adaptation and subversion of the conventions of the familiar letter and the discourse of friendship (or amicitia) in these more official, political occasions. Regarding the humanist’s efforts to get Giovanni Barrili of Naples and Niccolò Acciaiuoli of Florence into the same room, this paper addresses the topos of physical presence in the tradition of the familiar letter and the classical philosophical idea of friendship.
Social & Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages
Punctum Books, 2023
Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages seeks to expand our understanding of early medieval connectivity by interrogating social and intellectual collaborations, competitions, and communications among persons, places, things, and ideas in the European and Mediterranean West during the second half of the first millennium CE. In so doing, its contributors explore the existence, performance, and sustainability of diverse political, scholarly, ecclesiastical, and material networks via manuscripts, artifacts, and theories framed by two broad interpretive categories. The first examines networks of scholars, writers, and the social and political histories related to their productions. The second imagines the transmission of “knowledge” as information, rhetoric, object, and epistemic grounding. In addition, the book rigorously investigates the theoretical possibilities and problems of researching early medieval networks, attempts to re-construct historical networks, and critically analyzes the concept of “information.”