Adventures in Libraries

This essay recounts lessons learned over a career studying medieval manuscripts and the stories of those who made, used, and collected them. Medieval books long outlast their intended or original audiences and have fascinating cultural interactions that extend to the present. What this most pressingly throws up for me is ways of knowing things, and the epistemological value of memory. One needs to store away the little anomalies that one encounters — and be prepared for them to surface without bidding in some new context where they might prove generative. If humility might be a first perquisite of scholarly work, certainly memory would be a second. The essay originated as a lecture, delivered remotely in March 2021 for the Renaissance Studies Center at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL.

Evgenij Anan'in and the Problem of the Italian Renaissance

Статья посвящена участию русского историка-медиевиста Евгения Аркадьевича Ананьина, проживавшего в Италии, в дебатах вокруг концепции итальянского Ренессанса в первой половине XX в., его попыткам очистить поле ренессансных исследований от укоренившихся клише (в первую очередь от постулируемой антитезы Сред-невековья и Возрождения и представления о Ренессансе как возвращении к античности). Значительная часть публикаций Ананьина в итальянских научных журналах – полемические статьи и рецензии, раскрывающие панораму ренессансных концепций в Европе 1920–1930-х гг. Русский исследователь выступал против зарубежных историков, обесценивающих оригинальность итальянского Возрождения, и в целом против попыток использовать понятие Ренессанса ad usum proprium. В настоящей статье речь пойдет о некоторых ренессансных концепциях и их авторах (Буркхард, Бурдах, Папини, Вальзер, Забугин, Нейман, Нордстрем), о которых говорит (или же, наоборот, умалчивает) Ананьин, и о его собственных взглядах, скрывающихся за критическими замечаниями. В статье затрагивается кампания против оккупации иностранцами поля ренессансных исследований, развернутая в Италии в середине 1930-х гг., и связанное с этой кампанией открытое противостояние Ананьина итальянскому мыслителю и литератору Джованни Папини, ставшему во главе открывшегося во Флоренции в 1937 г. Национального института ренессансных исследований. The reevaluation of the dogmas and canons rooted in the Renaissance historiography was а сommon direction of the studies in this field in the first half of the 20th century. At that time many original concepts emerged that corrected or completely refuted the previous ones. The present article is devoted to the participation of the Russian historian Evgenij Anan’in, who lived and worked in Italy, in the debates around the notion of the Italian Renaissance and to his attempts to contribute to the elimination of cliché from the field of Renaissance studies (primarily to abolish the postulated antithesis of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the idea of the Renaissance as the revival of antiquity).A significant part of Anan’in's publications in Italian scientific journals consists of polemic articles and reviews, which reveal a panorama of Renaissance concepts in Europe of the 1920-1930s. The Russian researcher was strongly opposed to foreign historians who denied the originality of the Italian Renaissance; he also was against all the kind of attempts to use the concept of the Renaissance ad usum proprium (national, ideological etc.). The article focuses on the Renaissance concepts and their authors (Burkhard, Burdach, Papini, Walser, Zabughin, Neumann, Nordström), which Anan’in analyzed (or, conversely, clearly ignored) in his texts and on his own views that are hidden behind critical remarks. The publication also deals with a company deployed in Italy in the mid-1930s against the foreign «occupation» of the Renaissance field (the primacy in which was believed to belong to Italians) and the case of an open confrontation of Anan’in and Giovanni Papini, who became the head of the National Institute of Renaissance studies opened in Florence in 1937.

“Byzance apre`s Byzance” and Post-Byzantine Art from the Late Fifteenth Century through the Eighteenth Century

The study of the post-Byzantine world is now regarded as a field in its own right, separate from Byzantine studies or Renaissance studies. However, the scope of the discipline and the meaning of the term post-Byzantine—its conceptual, geographical, and chronological limits—remain unsettled. For art historians, the term typically refers to certain tendencies (especially in iconography and style) observable in and around one of a few centers of activity or spheres of influence within the Orthodox Christian world, typically identified as Ottoman-held vs. Venetian-held lands, or as Venetian Crete, Mt. Athos, and the “periphery” (i.e., everywhere else). Scholarly attention has also focused primarily on portable icons. Broadening the field to consider more types of objects across the whole geography under scrutiny, we can consider how art and ideas were received and adapted over time and across regions.

Dissent from Mt. Ventoux: Between Christian and Secular Humanism in Petrarch’s de Ascensu Montis Ventosi

Petrarch’s letter de Ascensu Montis Ventosi has long served as the founding document of “renaissance humanism”. Since thebeginning of renaissance studies in the mid-nineteenth century, the letter has become almost a talisman for summoning the new, secular spirit of humanism that spontaneously arrived in Italy in the fourteenth century, took hold of the hearts and minds of Europeans in the fifteenth century, and led to cataclysmic cultural, religious, and political changes in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This reading, still common among non-specialists, especially in the English-speaking world, is overly simplistic and ignores Petrarch’s profound debt to classical and Christian tradition, obscuring the fundamentally religious character of the letter. This article examines how scholars came to assign the letter so much importance and offers an interpretation that stresses Petrarch’s continuity with tradition and his desire to revitalize rather than reinvent the traditions of Christian scholarship and contemplation.