Two Day Course: 11-12 June 2025
This course will provide an introduction to illustrated manuscripts produced by non-professional scribes in fifteenth-century Florence. For the affluent merchant class, copying texts was a means of self-education. Together with the increasing availability of paper, this was one of the factors that facilitated the diffusion of the 'best-sellers' of the Italian Renaissance before the introduction of printing. The examples that will be discussed are outstanding testimonies to the literary and visual culture of Florentines in the Quattrocento.
The course will focus on a selection of manuscripts, including some of the most successful Italian vernacular texts of the Italian Renaissance: Aesop's Fables, the Fior di virtù (a moral treatise incorporating a bestiary), and La sfera (a poem on the configuration of the Cosmos and the world). Students will gain skills for:
- researching evidence of ownership in manuscripts;
- transcribing late-medieval Italian merchant script;
- understanding the transmission of texts and illustrations in the late Middle Ages.
Additional Information
Course Requirements
The course will be suitable for complete beginners. Knowledge of Italian would be an advantage, but it is not necessary
Essential Reading
Most recommended:
- Petrucci, Armando, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy, ed. and trans. by Charles Radding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chapter 9.
- Kent, Dale, Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance (New Haven CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000), chapter 6.
- Richardson, Brian, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter 1 (esp. pp. 34-53).
Also relevant to this course:
- Botana, Federico, ‘Family Wisdom in Quattrocento Florence: The Benci Aesop (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale MS II.II.83)’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 75 (2012), pp. 53–92.
- Grendler, Paul, ‘What Piero Learned in School: Fifteenth Century Vernacular Education’, in Paul Grendler, Renaissance Education between Religion and Politics (Aldershot, Surrey: Ashgate, 2006), part IV.
Location
This course will take place in Senate House.
Fees
Course fees for LIPS 2025 are below:
