Bernard de Lavinheta is commonly recognised as a seminal figure in Renaissance and early modern encyclopedism. A Spanish Franciscan and close colleague of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Charles de Bovelles and the Fabrist circle in Paris, he published his Practica compendiosa in 1523, marking a major milestone in the Lullist tradition. Yet the focus on Lavinheta as a pioneer of early modern method has often served to obscure his connection to a long medieval tradition of encyclopedism. Drawing out his links to (...) the Franciscan and Lullist traditions and to Nicholas of Cusa, this article seeks to reveal Lavinheta as pursuing an exemplarist encyclopedism in which logic, metaphysics and mathematics all cohere in Christ and demonstrate a pronounced Trinitarian dynamic. In doing so, it reveals an important spiritual and transformative dimension to the early modern encyclopedia, recontextualising the roots of universal reform in a long Franciscan tradition. (shrink)

By presenting new elements discovered during on-site research and comparing them to previous findings, this Note supports the view that the graffiti made by lansquenets in the Stanze of the Vatican Palace and in the Villa Farnesina in 1527 and 1528 during the sack of Rome should be seen in the context of an iconographic interaction with, rather than mere destruction of, the original artworks.

Students have been some of the least studied and most misunderstood historical actors in colonial America. This article seeks to reanimate the long since stagnated study of early American education. Focusing on student societies at colonial American colleges and digging into scores of overlooked manuscripts (in English, Latin, Greek and shorthand), this account offers a radically new understanding of early students as knowledge producers in a colonial world that respected and empowered their intellectual autonomy. Early American students needed neither a (...) revolution nor the importation of the nineteenth-century German research seminar to appreciate the benefits of mutual instruction conducted in small, self-governing groups. (shrink)

In 1463 Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici, employing a Greek manuscript recently brought to Florence from Macedonia. Yet even earlier, in his youthful writings, Ficino had cited Hermes, drawing on the available late ancient and medieval Latin sources and treating him both as a forerunner of Plato and as a witness to the Trinitarian nature of God. Since the first half of the fifteenth century, other humanists had shown a particular interest (...) in Hermetic sources concerning the nature of God, which was linked to the revived study of the Church Fathers, above all Lactantius. This interpretation of a Platonic Hermes in partial agreement with the Christian religion was based mainly on the similarities between the Timaeus and the Asclepius and was influenced by the School of Chartres; it remained a fixed point in Ficino’s conception of Platonic philosophy. (shrink)

This article presents some previously unpublished evidence of Isaac Casaubon’s studies of Islamic coins preserved in his notebooks. The notes show Casaubon’s attempts to decipher the coins, as well as the European-wide efforts of a group of scholars, including Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in France, Thomas Erpenius in the Netherlands and John Selden in England, to make sense of Arabic epigraphic inscriptions, attributions and titles on coinage; and it reveals the contribution to these efforts of a former enslaved person and (...) dragoman of the Republic of Venice, two Lebanese Maronites, a Turkish diplomat and an enslaved Moroccan at the port of Marseille. In particular, this study analyses Casaubon’s attempts to read, translate and decipher a group of Islamic coins, including a Norman coin, an Abbasid coin, an Ottoman coin, a stone seal amulet, an Artuqid coin and a contemporary Moroccan coin. It provides annotated Latin texts and modern English translations of Casaubon’s notes, along with Archbishop James Ussher’s comments on them; and it offers a potential identification of the coins. The article demonstrates that the coins were treated more as vehicles for the inscriptions they bore than as artefacts in their own right and confirms that the earliest approaches to understanding Islamic material culture in Europe were mediated through the Arabic language. Casaubon’s notes on Arabic and Turkish coins are among the first and most comprehensive studies of Islamic material culture of the early modern period. (shrink)

This article investigates the history of a reliquary containing objects associated with Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) and his legendary lover Laura. Originally part of the collection of Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1745–1831) in her Puławy residence in Poland, the reliquary now belongs to the National Museum in Cracow. In the first section, I reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the journey of a splinter of Petrarch’s cupboard and Laura’s finger bone to Puławy, from Arquà in 1818 and Avignon in 1820 respectively. The bulk of (...) the article is dedicated to analysing Izabela Czartoryska’s endeavours to elevate the status of these physically inconspicuous objects into historical relics. I argue that their semantic potential was revealed and manifested through the sophisticated container in which they were placed, the exhibition in which they were incorporated and the narrative that Czartoryska crafted around the fabled lovers. The example of the Puławy relic illustrates the mechanisms used during the era of sentimentalism to provide an object with the status of a historical relic, which was the only chance for such artefacts to survive—or at least to survive as meaningful entities. (shrink)

A little-known mendicant order, the Apostolic Clerics of St Jerome, better known as the ‘Jesuati’, was founded by Giovanni Colombini of Siena in the mid-fourteenth century, receiving formal recognition from Pope Urban V at Viterbo in 1367. The congregation flourished, particularly over the course of the fifteenth century when it established conventual houses in most major cities of central and northern Italy, but was eventually suppressed in 1668. Known for their piety, penance and service to the sick and dying, the (...) Jesuati played a significant role in the visual culture of later medieval and early modern Italy, and one that has subsequently been much neglected. This study will identify and discuss five categories in which the Jesuati intersected with the arts: church and convent architecture, images depicting the approval of the order by Urban V, altarpieces and other forms of church decoration, the trigram of the Holy Name of Jesus, and the manufacture of coloured glass and artists’ pigments, the latter including ultramarine azzurro that was highly prized. (shrink)

Since antiquity, there had been close ties between imagined movement through built spaces and organising knowledge. Philosophers and rhetorical theorists had argued that one remembered most effectively by imagining a sequence of places, including built spaces, and storing images of what should be recalled in those places. Authors of medieval pilgrimage narratives had led their readers on tours of sacred sites beginning in the twelfth century. From the late fifteenth century, however, imagined movement became more insistently physical and increasingly deployed (...) to communicate, rather than simply store, knowledge: built memory spaces were for the first time categorised according to size; volumes began to present pre-designed memory structures devoted to a particular topic; guidebooks to Rome started to lead readers on tours similar to those of pilgrimage narratives; and university botanic gardens offered the lived equivalent of sequences of memory places. By the seventeenth century, tours with sequences of spaces that stored information were a familiar technique across discourses from natural philosophy to architecture. This article examines the increasing physicality of imagined movement through these spaces and its connection to communicating knowledge as well as to shaping the attitudes of readers. I focus on mnemonic treatises and volumes presenting pre-designed spaces, the books where imagined movement was especially apparent, alongside guidebooks and botanic gardens. Consequently, built memory spaces, which have been little studied, are highlighted, and two rich but usually discrete strands of early modern history are brought together: history of memory and studies of movement through the built environment. (shrink)