Selected Studies by Stefano Gulizia
Bruniana et Campanelliana, 2019
Relying on Ambrosianus G 69 inf., a philosophical miscellany owned by
the celebrated collector Gi... more Relying on Ambrosianus G 69 inf., a philosophical miscellany owned by
the celebrated collector Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, this article examines an unpublished disputation about mathematical abstraction. In it, the Dominican theologian Tommaso Pellegrini defends traditional Aristotelian views on subalternate sciences; by contrast, Pompeo da Otranto offers a rebuttal anchored on Ockham’s theory of intellectual habits. The reconstruction of this epistemic debate sheds much needed light
on various forms of assembling Aristotle within the protocols of Pinelli’s scholarship and paperwork.
Natural Knowledge and Aristotelianism at Early Modern Protestant Universities, ed. Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Volkhard Wels, 2019
Intellectual History Review, 2019
This paper tries to present a different view of Francesco Patrizi’s antiAristotelian philology su... more This paper tries to present a different view of Francesco Patrizi’s antiAristotelian philology such as it transpires in his masterful
monograph of 1581, the Discussiones Peripateticae, the influence
of which was widely felt in seventeenth-century Europe. The book
is the product of a learned, Hellenizing, and deeply inspired
critique of a major doctrinal corpus from classical antiquity, and it
is usually taken as a stepping stone in a self-righteous fight by
“modern” philosophers to replace Aristotelianism as the dominant
academic system. This essay is revisionist on the second of these
accounts.
Philosophical Readings, 2019
This paper looks at the carnival of 1513 in Urbino, when Castiglione served as a stage-manager an... more This paper looks at the carnival of 1513 in Urbino, when Castiglione served as a stage-manager and supervised the performance of Bibbiena’s Calandria. I place my study of comic business at the intersection of cognitive science and the history of the senses. I am interested in
embodiment and stage-subjugation, in environmental and phenomenological practice, and in the range of ways in which, through props and plot, a notion akin to Bourdieu’s habitus found its place. In this framework, the “greenery” invoked by Castiglione in his letter functions as an episode of sensorial control, not only visual, but also olfactory and aural—a suitable portal of cognition. By emphasizing the material effects of local places on the stage, I also argue that any study of Bibbiena’s Calandria gains a greater cultural interrelationship once it is set against an international backdrop; its geopolitical breadth is documented not only by
several revivals of the play in Venice, but also by its dialogic relations with at least two distinct traditions: the Celestinesque drama and Lucian’s utopic fiction.
Quaderni Folenghiani, 6-7, 2010: 113-134
The large collection assembled by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503-1575) in his residence in Venice... more The large collection assembled by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503-1575) in his residence in Venice, a city that Charles V had the political imperative to keep within the Holy League, included an impressive range of objects: books and manuscripts, but also antiquities and paintings. By placing Hurtado de Mendoza in the context of specific Venetian trends of book-collecting and antiquarianism—with particular regards to the Greek library of Bessarion and its other public competitors of the time—this article argues that, rather than thinking of the archive as a collection of passive objects amassed and wielded by a sovereign agent or agents for the purposes of sociopolitical performance (rivalry, anticlericalism, etc), it makes more sense, both materially and historically, to think of the library as a networked assemblage of objects that are themselves mutable and "in motion" at all levels.
This paper focuses on the celebrated episode of the library of Saint-Victor in Rabelais’s Pantagr... more This paper focuses on the celebrated episode of the library of Saint-Victor in Rabelais’s Pantagruel (chap. VII), and of the edition of Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani’s Topographia antiquae Romae.
This essay proposes an exercise of detailed and contextual reading of the Erasmian adage Festina ... more This essay proposes an exercise of detailed and contextual reading of the Erasmian adage Festina lente, which contains a cultural diagnosis of Aldus Manutius as a prominent historical actor within a motley Venetian cohort of printing personae ranging from humanists to street peddlers. While the central sections are taken, successively, by Roman antiquarian themes, bibliophilic assessment, and the epistemic problem of marginalia in a Byzantine lexicon consulted by Erasmus while in Venice, the introduction and conclusion further expand the results of this localized inquiry by raising the early modern problem of expertise and following the idea of Herculean printing in Erasmus as a pedagogical and philosophical model.
Book Review of E.R. Truitt's monograph.
This essay proposes an exercise of 'global microhistory' centered on Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (15... more This essay proposes an exercise of 'global microhistory' centered on Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591-1655), an itinerant Jewish alchemist and inventor, born in Candia, who was one of the student-lodgers at Casa Galileo in Padua between 1606 and 1613. Instead of asking primarily if or why this scholar was the first Jewish Copernican, Delmedigo's experience is framed against a stable background of trade, antiquarianism, and astronomical interests spanning from Padua to the Eastern Mediterranean. In light of this network of scholarly intermediation, which is also foreshadowed by the information system generated by Gianfrancesco Sagredo in his consular years in Syria, the managing of Galileo's experimental household is spatially de-centered; as a main result , the lone theoretician, or homo clausus, gives way to the artisanal epistemology of a homo faber.
This essay addresses printing and instrument making as crucial features in the accumulation and d... more This essay addresses printing and instrument making as crucial features in the accumulation and dissemination of cosmographical knowledge; as a corollary, it also frames the avalanche of data from the New World as a problem of 'information management'. In this respect, while standard treatments of the topic emphasize the epistemological gathering directed by royal institutions, I maintain that armchair erudition and discovery were still coessential, if not overlapping. My discussion pursues a specific case study – the use of Pedro de Medina's nautical tract in Seville, Venice and Antwerp – aiming to rewrite some aspects of network theory in terms of translation. Simultaneously, it tracks epistemological changes taking place within the cognitive jurisdictions of the printing house, and examines descriptions of instruments, woodcuts, and diagrams, to visualize how historical actors used to communicate with patrons, mathematicians, and craftsmen.
Society and Politics, vol. 8, no. 2 (2014): 8-22. Special issue: Organizing and Disseminating Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, edited by Doina-Cristina Rusu.
This essay discusses the emergence of empirical practices both in houses of craft and medicinal l... more This essay discusses the emergence of empirical practices both in houses of craft and medicinal laboratories in Venice during the 1550s, a period in which, with the fortunate collection of the Secrets of Alexis anonymously published by the relentless polymath Girolamo Ruscelli, the Venetian world had firmly sided with the printed word as a strategy of scientific information and communication, progressively pushing manuscript communication to the verge of irrelevance. As I argue, it was a diffuse sense of saturation in the Venetian marketplace of similar 'galleries' and 'theatres'a phenomenon traditionally ascribed to the rise of the early modern museum -that gave Ruscelli his reputation as a master of virtual witnessing. I present here some examples of commerce and collecting, translations, and visual adaptations in print as representative of epistemological changes taking place within commercial and long-distance networks, and I examine the type of gathering activities both institutions and people deployed as they extended the technological and cognitive jurisdictions of media within the printing house.
The Decameron Third Day in Perspective, eds. Francesco Ciabattoni and Pier Massimo Forni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 44-67.
Folengo in America, ed. Massimo Scalabrini (Ravenna: Longo, 2012), pp. 153-195.
Studi rinascimentali 9 (2011): 115-127.
MLN 123:1 (2008): 160-178.
... Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Martelli, Mario. "Una delle Intercenali di Leon Battista Alberti... more ... Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Martelli, Mario. "Una delle Intercenali di Leon Battista Alberti fonte sconosciuta del Furioso." La Bibliofilia 66 (1964): 16370. ... Segre, Cesare. "Nel mondo della luna, ovvero Leon Battista Alberti e Ludovico Ariosto." Id. Esperienze ariostesche. ...
Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, vol. 184, n. 608 (2008): 582-597.
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Selected Studies by Stefano Gulizia
the celebrated collector Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, this article examines an unpublished disputation about mathematical abstraction. In it, the Dominican theologian Tommaso Pellegrini defends traditional Aristotelian views on subalternate sciences; by contrast, Pompeo da Otranto offers a rebuttal anchored on Ockham’s theory of intellectual habits. The reconstruction of this epistemic debate sheds much needed light
on various forms of assembling Aristotle within the protocols of Pinelli’s scholarship and paperwork.
monograph of 1581, the Discussiones Peripateticae, the influence
of which was widely felt in seventeenth-century Europe. The book
is the product of a learned, Hellenizing, and deeply inspired
critique of a major doctrinal corpus from classical antiquity, and it
is usually taken as a stepping stone in a self-righteous fight by
“modern” philosophers to replace Aristotelianism as the dominant
academic system. This essay is revisionist on the second of these
accounts.
embodiment and stage-subjugation, in environmental and phenomenological practice, and in the range of ways in which, through props and plot, a notion akin to Bourdieu’s habitus found its place. In this framework, the “greenery” invoked by Castiglione in his letter functions as an episode of sensorial control, not only visual, but also olfactory and aural—a suitable portal of cognition. By emphasizing the material effects of local places on the stage, I also argue that any study of Bibbiena’s Calandria gains a greater cultural interrelationship once it is set against an international backdrop; its geopolitical breadth is documented not only by
several revivals of the play in Venice, but also by its dialogic relations with at least two distinct traditions: the Celestinesque drama and Lucian’s utopic fiction.
the celebrated collector Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, this article examines an unpublished disputation about mathematical abstraction. In it, the Dominican theologian Tommaso Pellegrini defends traditional Aristotelian views on subalternate sciences; by contrast, Pompeo da Otranto offers a rebuttal anchored on Ockham’s theory of intellectual habits. The reconstruction of this epistemic debate sheds much needed light
on various forms of assembling Aristotle within the protocols of Pinelli’s scholarship and paperwork.
monograph of 1581, the Discussiones Peripateticae, the influence
of which was widely felt in seventeenth-century Europe. The book
is the product of a learned, Hellenizing, and deeply inspired
critique of a major doctrinal corpus from classical antiquity, and it
is usually taken as a stepping stone in a self-righteous fight by
“modern” philosophers to replace Aristotelianism as the dominant
academic system. This essay is revisionist on the second of these
accounts.
embodiment and stage-subjugation, in environmental and phenomenological practice, and in the range of ways in which, through props and plot, a notion akin to Bourdieu’s habitus found its place. In this framework, the “greenery” invoked by Castiglione in his letter functions as an episode of sensorial control, not only visual, but also olfactory and aural—a suitable portal of cognition. By emphasizing the material effects of local places on the stage, I also argue that any study of Bibbiena’s Calandria gains a greater cultural interrelationship once it is set against an international backdrop; its geopolitical breadth is documented not only by
several revivals of the play in Venice, but also by its dialogic relations with at least two distinct traditions: the Celestinesque drama and Lucian’s utopic fiction.