Seminars

Luis de Carvajal, el mozo arrived in New Spain in 1579 together with his large extended family of judeo-conversos. While living an outwardly devout Catholic life, Luis maintained a passionate secret commitment to his ancestral faith. Rather than a mimetic attachment to certain rituals or garbled prayers passed down by his parents, Luis was committed to a re-creation of Jewish practice and belief based on sacred text. With no knowledge of Hebrew and with the strict prohibition on Jewish books, Luis sought out Jewish texts as they were preserved in Christian books: the Hebrew Bible as part of the Vulgate, Psalms as they appear in a breviary, passages of Talmud and Maimonides cited at length in the works of Oleaster and Nicholas of Lyra. This talk will explore the ways that Luis transforms these Latin texts into a Judaized Spanish and how the texts are transformed by his subversive translations. Luis often translates texts loosely, weaving in added details and rhetorical flourishes. To what extent is this a purposeful mistranslation, an undermining of the ideological power invested in these Catholic books by Carvajal’s extraction of their Hebraic source material?

Having worked on the Vatican manuscript, Urb. lat. 276 for several years, I edited it in facsimile in 1984 (Codices e Vaticanis Selecti, LX). The accompanying volume appeared in German, and was translated and published in Italian and in Spanish in 1985; a lengthy article summarizing my findings appeared in English in Viator in 1996. I am now working on a revised second edition of the volume, in which my earlier, quite tentative attribution of the over 500 animal illustrations to the Mantuan artist, Teodoro Ghisi, will be revised, perhaps also tentatively, but with striking visual evidence in support of the arguments. This evidence, some of which has recently been published in a Festschrift for the historian of philosophy, Endre Szécsényi, and elsewhere, will be discussed, along with more recent thoughts on the history of the manuscript itself.

This paper reconsiders the emergence of naturalism around 1400 by examining the production of illustrated herbals as a site where artistic practice and specialized knowledge of plants intersected. Rather than proposing a direct transmission of motifs from medical manuscripts to panel painting, it asks how painters acquired the visual and morphological expertise necessary to render plants recognizably and with increasing precision. The argument centers on two northern Italian examples of botanical image-making, the Carrara Herbal and the Codex Bellunensis tradition, which exemplify markedly different but complementary modes of representation. Whereas the former pursued a persuasive likeness of carefully prepared specimens, the latter subjected plants to an analytical pictorial procedure based on multiple viewpoints, isolated structures, enlarged details, and different stages of growth. Most remarkably, the Bellunensis tradition preserves what appear to be the earliest known European nature prints, made around 1370 by impressing actual plant parts directly onto paper. Corrections and pentimenti further suggest sustained collaboration between painters and plant experts. I argue that such practices made image production itself a form of inquiry: painters did not merely illustrate existing knowledge but participated in its visual articulation, acquisition, and transmission. Seen from this perspective, the naturalism in panel paintings belongs to a broader history of learned observation in which artisanal skill and epistemic practice became increasingly intertwined.

One of the more puzzling aspects of European depictions of people of Black African descent is the ubiquity of the device of the head of a Black African, which appears in family coats of arms, in civic and territorial insignia, and in the fictional heraldry employed for several different kinds of sacred subjects. There is no general consensus about how such representations arose, beginning in the early 1300s, or how they were originally meant to be understood. In conjunction with my work on a forthcoming exhibition at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi (Sovrani e Servitori: Neri d’Africa nell’Arte della Firenze Medicea/Sovereigns and Servants: Black Africans in Florentine Art of the Medici Era), I have been trying to make sense of the confusing array of such motifs in Florentine culture. My talk will examine how the Florentine Pucci, Albertinelli and Ridolfi da Ponte families deployed their family devices, how this usage contrasts with the largely pejorative character of similar imagery in sacred narrative, and the relationship between these heraldic images and other less reductive Florentine depictions of Black people.

In 1519, the publication of Utopia by the Florentine press Giunti sparked immediate interest in More’s text among Italian intellectuals. Over the next 35 years, Utopia was imitated, included in elaborate literary games, translated into Italian (1548), and inserted into larger works. However, the fascination with More’s work abruptly ceased midway through the century. In the Seicento, Utopia recaptured the attention of Italian authors. A crucial factor in the revival of More’s text was Giambattista Bidelli’s 1620 edition. Unlike the earlier Italian version, “Bidelli’s Utopia” contained the paratext that had accompanied the original edition, thus providing Italian readers with a more accurate picture of how More had conceived Utopia. Scholars (Manual and Manuel, Firpo) argue that the resurgence of interest in More’s text during the Seicento lacked the inventiveness of the previous century’s utopian endeavors. However, a careful analysis of the literary and conceptual features of 17th-century Italian works that engaged with Utopia tells a different story. The renewed focus on More’s text in the Italian Seicento led to compelling ways of reimagining Utopia. Some authors expanded upon the limited utopian attempts of the 16 th century by developing more complex and theoretically sophisticated utopias. Others creatively transformed Utopia by employing unusual literary genres. However, the most innovative development was that Utopia was not just used or imitated—it was also examined critically. Some thinkers investigated its place in the history of utopian thought by considering its relation to ancient utopias, while others tried to integrate More’s utopianism into political philosophy.

In the porch of the church of Santa Felicita in Florence sits the imposing funerary monument of one Arcangela Paladini (1596-1622). It bears the intriguing inscription, "Scatter this stone with roses, for here, innocent and of celestial song, lies the siren of Tuscany and the muse of Italy.” Who was this “siren of Tuscany” and why did she, having died at the tender age of 26, merit such a monument? My paper explores the brief life and career of this “siren,” who was not only an angelic singer at the Medici court but also an accomplished painter whose self portrait hangs in the Uffizi galleries. I will also discuss her relationship with contemporary artists and composers, among them Artemisia Gentileschi and Francesca Caccini; her marriage to a wealthy Dutch tapestry- maker; and her musical self-fashioning as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. In a description of one of the singer’s captivating performances at court the writer states that he “must not fail to mention the wonderful amazement that Signora Arcangela left in the hearts of everyone there as she represented Saint Cecilia in such a beautiful and devout manner, both with her presence and her song . . . .” I suggest that Arcangela’s representation of Saint Cecilia on that occasion was informed by a tradition of Cecilian imagery that goes back to the early 16th century, with Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia being the prime example. I also discuss the special place of solo singing in the court culture of Medicean Florence, which in fact culminated in the birth of opera.

In 1604, Juan Navarro, a Franciscan priest ministering to indigenous communities in Mexico, composed the first book of original music both written and printed in the Americas. Remarkably, it was also the last music book printed in Mexico for more than a century. Navarro's Quatuor Passiones Christi Domini (Four Passions of Our Lord Christ) contains newly composed plainchant settings of the Passion narratives from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, along with the Lamentations and Prayer of Jeremiah--texts and music intended for Holy Week, the most solemn period of the Church year. Marked by heightened emotion and ritual intensity, Holy Week annually disrupts the regular rhythms of the liturgical calendar and blurs the boundaries between clerical and lay devotional practices. Following the Council of Trent (1545-1563) – and especially in the wake of the Third Mexican Provincial Council of 1585 – Holy Week came under increased scrutiny for perceived abuses and excessive variation in its liturgical observance. This presentation situates Navarro's largely overlooked Quatuor Passiones as both a witness to and an agent of post-Tridentine liturgical reform beyond the Christian centers of Western Europe, with particular attention to its impact in mission churches serving indigenous communities in colonial New Spain.

The theme builds upon two previous works, one in which I argued that migration is the engine of history. And therein pointed at the existential condition that perhaps migrating (verbal noun) is primordial to being-in-the-world insofar as Being, Dasein, moves, pro-jects, acquires (a sense of) self when with others. The migrant provides the ontological category for an idea of the human being who ab initio requires energy, space/freedom to change place, and (speech) capacity to modulate itself during encounters along the way. My earlier research was dedicated to the epochal epistemological shift that occurred starting with the great navigations towards the Americas. It dealt with Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, Waldseemüller. I now turn to the next generation: Pigafetta, Cortés, Bernardino de Sahagún, Verrazzano, Bartolomé de las Casas, and other migrants (sailors, conquerors, explorers, merchants, delegations, sponsors of the succession of ships that started plying the Atlantic) drawn from various archives. My aim is to interpret how their descriptions of these “other worlds” foreground certain symbols about movement/relocation and how allusions point to the cracking of the inherited (though revitalized in the XIV-XV centuries) theo-metaphysical assumptions about human beings and their values and function in this no longer sole, or unitary, or stable World. And how perhaps people have always been “on the move” between worlds, between and within city-states and kingdoms. Even in the Americas. The “conquest” itself offers proof of an intersectional “encounter” among flows of humans. Is a “degrounded” humanism possible? Would Hermes be the new deity?

The ducal palace of Vila Viçosa, in the Alentejo region of Portugal, housed one of the most significant libraries of sixteenth-century Iberia. At the death of Dom Teodósio I, Duke of Bragança, in 1563, a post-mortem inventory recorded not only over a thousand books in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and various vernaculars, but also a remarkable array of artefacts. In the first section of the inventory — titled 'Panos que estão nesta casa da liuraria & outras cousas & pintados' — one finds large illuminated maps on parchment, atlases, astronomical instruments, celestial and terrestrial globes and paintings with biblical and classical subjects. These items, alongside the books, in particular those listed under the heading 'Astrologia e Matematica', reveal a materially and intellectually curated space. This talk examines how globes, quadrants, maps, and books functioned together in D. Teodósio's library and asks what it meant to bring together such tools of erudition in a single, architecturally bounded setting. The court of the Braganças actively competed with the Portuguese royal court and other European courts, promoting literary gatherings — sometimes described as an 'Academia' — and even envisaging the foundation of a 'Studium Generale'. Drawing on the findings of the research project 'De todas as partes do mundo' (PI: Jessica Hallett), including Ana Isabel Buescu’s analysis of the library inventory and Hugo Miguel Crespo’s detailed work on domestic and scholarly objects, this presentation explores the spatial and material culture of mathematics in a courtly context, and how science, art, and authority were made to cohabit the same room.

In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (c. 1549), Etienne de la Boétie asks, of the condition of servitude: ‘Is this life? Can we call this living?’ He despairs over those who seem more alive in body than in spirit, and those whose desire to live on is more powerful than their desire to be free. Desire is a critical theme for La Boétie, who was also a love poet and whose Discourse was influenced by Petrarchan themes. In his Sonets pour Helene (1578) Ronsard writes ‘I must hide myself / So as to not die and be reborn so many times’. Scholars have discussed the tension in Petrarchan lyric between life and death, with each sonnet a re-animation both of generic tropes and of the lyric voice that repeatedly expresses its conflicted desire for continued life. Why live on, why want to survive? This paper examines literary concern with this question in mid- sixteenth century France, taking La Boétie’s text and its poetic contexts as a case study. I argue that desire conditions the representation of life in these works with complex political implications, ask whether a survival motif inflects ‘renaissance’ writing within and beyond lyric, and consider the theoretical and historical stakes of approaching early modern texts from this perspective. This work is drawn from the first chapter of my current book project, titled Surviving the Renaissance.

In several works Bruno combines themes and ideas from the Kabbalah and the Apocalypse. Francesco Giorgi and Heinrich Agrippa von Nettesheim, among other Renaissance Kabbalists, had done so too but, unconventional though their views might be, they had aspired to remain within the bounds of orthodoxy. Bruno, by contrast, had no such scruples. The Kabbalah and the Apocalypse were two aspects of the same Jewish religion, one that, at best, preserved traces of the ancient wisdom of Egypt, at worst, knowingly peddled lies and false promises.

My paper presents the personal story of and analyzes the books of histories by a forgotten historian of the early modern Mediterranean: Luigi Parma, who was active in Venice in the middle of the 1540s and died before 1552. A pro-Spaniard historian, involved in trans-imperial espionage in Venice, Luigi Parma was the author, among other texts, of a forgotten, and essentially unexplored, Mediterranean and Eurasian history of the wars between the Spanish and the Ottoman Empires (1535-1545), entitled History of Charles V’s Wars Against the Turks. This historical work was seized by the Counsel of Ten in 1544 and has remained unread, and unstudied, at the Biblioteca Marciana since then. A microhistorical exploration of Luigi Parma’s personal story and the analysis of Parma’s History allows us to enter the political, diplomatic, and intellectual laboratory of a historian of the early modern globalizing world, whose life, aspirations, and works have been crushed in the great trans-imperial rivalry of the sixteenth century.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) constantly studied light and shadows. His thinking on the matter turned to questions of Platonic metaphysics, geometric optics, and cosmology, as well as practical experiments. One long-neglected aspect of his reflections on light and shadows is how he repeatedly discussed the nature of pinhole images and camerae obscurae. According to Ficinian reasonings, the camera obscura is not just a dark box that serves as an analogue to Plato’s allegorical cave, it is also an experimental tool that demonstrates the nature of light and shadows. One particularly interesting instance of Ficino's experimental thinking is how he explains that the eye functions like a camera obscura. However important this explanation of the eye might be for understanding Ficino's place in the history of vision, Ficino never detached his thinking about camera obscurae (as well as geometric optics and cosmology more broadly) from metaphysical considerations.