Early modern readers of Herodotus, especially those in the Italian peninsula, on occasion established an analogy between their situation in relation to the expanding Turkish empire in the sixteenth century and that of the eastern Mediterranean world, especially the Greek world, in relation to the Persian empire as outlined in Herodotus’ Histories. Readers used their encounter with the Herodotean text as a filter through which to comment on and make sense of what at times must have appeared to them to be the beginning of the end of western culture as they knew it. In 1491, not long after the Este court in Ferrara sponsored Matteo Maria Boiardo’s translation of Herodotus into Italian, Zoanne Pencaro, a minor figure in the court, commissioned the production of a manuscript copy in which he made a remarkable set of annotations in the vernacular (nearly 2500 words) that show a growing awareness of the ancient near east.
Angelika Berlejung & Judith E. Filitz (eds.). The Physicality of the Other. Masks from the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean