Poggio Bracciolini and the Re(Dis)Covery of Antiquity: Textual and Material Traditions Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Bryn Mawr College on April 8-9, 2016
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Textual and Material and Traditions Textual Antiquity: of Poggio Bracciolini the and Re(dis)covery oggio Bracciolini and the Re(dis)covery ofP Antiquity: Textual and Material Traditions PROCEEDINGS OF THE SYMPOSIUM HELD at Bryn Mawr College on April 8-9 2016 Edited by Roberta Ricci FIRENZE UNIVERSITY PRESS ATTI ISSN 2239-3307 (PRINT) | ISSN 2704-6230 (ONLINE) – 38 – ISI FLORENCE SERIES Editor-in-Chief Stefano Baldassarri, ISI Florence, Italy Scientific Board Erika Bianchi, ISI Florence, Italy Marino Biondi, University of Florence, Italy James Hankins, Harvard University, United States Francesca Marini, ISI Florence, Italy Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University, United States Fabrizio Meroi, University of Trento, Italy Sergio Zatti, University of Pisa, Italy Titoli già pubblicati Serena Baldini e David Marini, Vorrei. Corso di lingua italiana di livello elementare 1. Libro di testo e libro degli esercizi, 2016 Serena Baldini e David Marini, Vorrei. Corso di lingua italiana di livello elementare 1 e 2. Libro di testo e libro degli esercizi, 2019 Poggio Bracciolini and the Re(dis)covery of Antiquity: Textual and Material Traditions Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Bryn Mawr College on April 8-9, 2016 edited by Roberta Ricci with assistance from Eric L. Pumroy FIRENZE UNIVERSITY PRESS 2020 Poggio Bracciolini and the Re(dis)covery of Antiquity : Textual and Material Traditions : proceedings of the Symposium Held at Bryn Mawr College on April 8-9, 2016 / edited by Roberta Ricci with assistance from Eric L. Pumroy. – Firenze : Firenze University Press, 2020. (Atti ; 38) https://www.fupress.com/isbn/9788864539683 ISSN 2239-3307 (print) ISSN 2704-6230 (online) ISBN 978-88-6453-967-6 (print) ISBN 978-88-6453-968-3 (online PDF) DOI 10.36253/978-88-6453-968-3 Graphic design: Alberto Pizarro Fernández, Lettera Meccanica SRLs Front cover photo: Poggio Bracciolini, De nobilitate, ms. 48, ca.1450, Bryn Mawr College (USA) FUP Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (DOI: 10.36253/fup_best_practice) All publications are submitted to an external refereeing process under the responsibility of the FUP Editorial Board and the Scientific Boards of the series. The works published are evaluated and approved by the Editorial Board of the publishing house, and must be compliant with the Peer review policy, the Open Access, Copyright and Licensing policy and the Publication Ethics and Complaint policy. Firenze University Press Editorial Board M. Garzaniti (Editor-in-Chief), M.E. Alberti, M. Boddi, A. Bucelli, R. Casalbuoni, F. Ciampi, A. Dolfi, R. Ferrise, P. Guarnieri, R. Lanfredini, P. Lo Nostro, G. Mari, A. Mariani, P.M. Mariano, S. Marinai, R. Minuti, P. Nanni, A. Orlandi, A. Perulli, G. Pratesi, O. Roselli. The online digital edition is published in Open Access on www.fupress.com. Content license: the present work is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license allows you to share any part of the work by any means and format, modify it for any purpose, including commercial, as long as appropriate credit is given to the author, any changes made to the work are indicated and a URL link is provided to the license. Metadata license: all the metadata are released under the Public Domain Dedication license (CC0 1.0 Universal: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode). © 2020 Author(s) Published by Firenze University Press Firenze University Press Università degli Studi di Firenze via Cittadella, 7, 50144 Firenze, Italy www.fupress.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Italy TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION VII Roberta Ricci FLORENCE 1438: THE ENCOMIUM OF THE FLORENTINA LIBERTAS SENT BY POGGIO BRACCIOLINI TO DUKE FILIPPO MARIA VISCONTI 1 Ann Mullaney, Massimo Zaggia THE HISTORIAE FLORENTINI POPULI BY POGGIO BRACCIOLINI. GENESIS AND FORTUNE OF AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF FLORENCE 25 Outi Merisalo POGGIO BRACCIOLINI’S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BRYN MAWR, MS. 48 41 David Rundle POGGIO BRACCIOLINI AND COLUCCIO SALUTATI: THE EPITAPH AND THE 1405-1406 LETTERS 71 Stefano U. Baldassarri POGGIO AND ALBERTI REVISITED 89 David Marsh SHIFTING TIMES, CONVERGING FUTURES: TECHNOLOGIES OF WRITING BEYOND POGGIO BRACCIOLINI 103 Roberta Ricci SCRIPT AS IMAGE: VISUAL ACUITY IN THE SCRIPT OF POGGIO BRACCIOLINI 119 Philippa Sissis POGGIO BRACCIOLINI, AN INSCRIPTION IN TERRANUOVA, AND THE MONUMENT TO CARLO MARSUPPINI: A THEORY 149 Paul Shaw Roberta Ricci (edited by), Poggio Bracciolini and the Re(dis)covery of Antiquity: Textual and Material Traditions. Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Bryn Mawr College on April 8-9, 2016, © 2020 Author(s), content CC BY 4.0 International, metadata CC0 1.0 Universal, published by Firenze University Press (www.fupress.com), ISSN 2704-6230 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-968-3 (online PDF), DOI 10.36253/978-88-6453-968-3 VI POGGIO BRACCIOLINI AND THE HUMANISTIC WORLD POGE THE FLORENTYN: A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF POGGIO BRACCIOLINI 163 David Cast POGGIO AND OTHER BOOK HUNTERS 173 Julia Haig Gaisser POGGIO BRACCIOLINI, PHYLLIS GOODHART GORDAN, AND THE FORMATION OF THE GOODHART COLLECTION OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY BOOKS AT BRYN MAWR COLLEGE 189 Eric L. Pumroy LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 199 LIST OF FIGURES 203 INTRODUCTION Roberta Ricci In April 2016, together with Eric Pumroy and David Cast, I organized an interdisciplinary, two-day symposium at Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), dedicated to the Humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) and his exceptionally wide variety of literary activities in and beyond Florence. Distinguished speakers, including our president emerita and Renaissance scholar Nancy Vickers, traveled from the other side of the Atlantic and the West Coast to gather at Bryn Mawr College, highlighting the richly variegated nuances of the intellectual world in early Renaissance Italy and investigating Humanism in its vibrant driving force towards modernity. The title for the symposium Classicism, Humanism, and Modernity: Poggio Bracciolini and Beyond is here modified to better represent this collection of essays, which stands on its own and includes, updates, and enriches that collaboration rather than just representing a record of the proceedings of our successful colloquium. The core of this volume lays out a range of exchanges between hugely influential figures in 15th-century Florence, while at the same time focusing on Bracciolini’s vibrant contribution to many fields of knowledge in the Western intellectual tradition, spanning across politics and historiography, material and print culture, translation and language acquisition, philology and manuscript studies, calligraphy and paleography. The authors who contributed to this volume naturally worked independently, and yet their essays touch on and interrogate the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship of salient and intertwined aspects of early-Renaissance culture. Poggius Florentinus (1380-1459), as Bracciolini proudly called him- self, was an influential intellectual, a pivotal figure in the early history of Humanism, a well-known scholar, and a prolific writer. In David Run- dle’s words, he was «the most human of humanists» (2005: 1). In 1405, Bracciolini was made scriptor in the Papal Curia; in 1410, he became Pa- pal secretary and, finally, in 1453, Chancellor of Florence, after having worked for seven pontiffs during his fifty years in the papal service. He joined the generation of civic humanists that glorified learning studium( ), literacy (eloquentia), and erudition (eruditio) as the chief concerns of man, Roberta Ricci, Introduction, pp. VII-XII, © 2020 Author(s), CC BY 4.0 International, DOI 10.36253/978- 88-6453-968-3.03 VIII Roberta Ricci and held that government was a shared responsibility for all its citizens. Moreover, and to the points of some essays published here, as a young man, Bracciolini had been employed by Coluccio Salutati as a copyist in Florence, and there he had mastered the new art of humanist hand- writing. Later, as a book hunter, he found and identified many classical manuscripts, which, moldy and inaccessible, had lain unread for hundreds of years in European libraries. Thanks to Stephen Greenblatt’s best sell- er titled The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Nonfiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction), Poggio Bracciolini, «the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance» (13), has been riding a wave of recent attention in the United States for his discovery of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Within the impact of civic Humanism and the much-debated notion of florentina libertas, Massimo Zaggia’s The Encomium of the “Florentina Libertas” Sent by Poggio Bracciolini to Duke Filippo Maria Visconti offers a new critical edition of Bracciolini’s letter, dated 15 September 1438, to Duke Filippo Maria Visconti in Milan, which constitutes an addition to Phyllis Gordan’s Two Renaissance Book Hunters, 1974, and a development from the Harth edition, 1984-1987. The letter represents «a manifesta- tion of civic pride» in Florence against Milan. Based on the geographical distribution of the eighteen surviving manuscripts of this Latin epistola (Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice, Vicenza, Basel, Vienna, Prague, Mu- nich, Berlin, Lüneburg, Dresden) «we can truly say that this letter from September 15, 1438 has done much to spread the legend of Florence in Italy, in Europe, and today, also in America». Along the same lines of political engagement and military power,