On Tuesday, February 15, 2022 at 3 p.m. on Zoom, French & Italian Studies will host Dr. Natale Vacalebre, speaking on publisher Aldus Manutius. This talk will be of interest to all in the Humanities, and especially to Italian Studies and Textual Studies faculty and students.
The human and intellectual journey of Aldus Manutius (1455-1515) was unique in many ways. Aldus was not only the humanist-publisher who revolutionized the way printed books were produced and disseminated; he was also the first publisher to consider books as bridges of peace at a time when bloody wars were tearing apart the entire Italian peninsula. This talk will illustrate Aldus’ thoughts on the usefulness of written culture and, in particular, of books as vehicles of brotherhood and pacifism. At the same time, it will analyze the intellectual relationships Aldus developed with European princes through the dedicatory epistles he wrote and included in his editions.
Natale Vacalebre is Benjamin Franklin Fellow in Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he is currently completing a research project on the Renaissance readers of Dante's Divine Comedy. He is also Managing Editor of the UPenn academic journal Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies, which he founded in 2018. A scholar of the circulation of written culture and the history of libraries in the early modern age, Vacalebre is the author of numerous articles published in international academic journals, as well as of the monograph Come le armadure e l’armi. Per una storia delle antiche biblioteche della Compagnia di Gesù (Florence: Olschki, 2016). In 2020 he was awarded the Charles Hall Grandgent Award by the Dante Society of America for his paper on the recent discovery of Guglielmo Maramauro’s commentary on the Commedia, of which he is preparing a critical edition with an English translation.
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