Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe

In this dense, meticulous, yet readable study of the De inventoribus rerum of Italian humanist Polydore Vergil (c.1470-1555), Catherine Atkinson has shed new light on a highly signifi cant presence in sixteenth-century encyclopedism, religion, and history of ideas.Vergil's work appeared over several decades: the fi rst three books, published in 1499, being supplemented with fi ve more in 1521.Th ere is an authoritative critical text and translation of books I-III by Brian Copenhaver (2002); for books IV-VIII, Benno Weiss and Louis Pérez's translation of all eight books (1997) is very useful.Originally Atkinson's 2005 doctoral dissertation at the Universität Hannover, Inventing Inventors gratifyingly provides the level of analysis one would anticipate in the wake of Copenhaver's seminal 1978 article on Vergil, "Th e Historiography of Discovery in the Renaissance," and his subsequent work.Atkinson also considerably revises and supplements Denys Hay's 1952 literary biography of Vergil, which, like Copenhaver's work, has gone largely unanswered in kind until now, although several excellent smaller-scale studies of specifi c aspects of Vergil's work have appeared.As Hay, Copenhaver, and Atkinson all observe, despite its great infl uence in its time and Vergil's special aff ection for it, the De Inventoribus has suff ered heavily from the eclipse of his renown in later centuries, which the above-named scholars are att empting to re-establish.Th is work has recently att racted less att ention than his Anglica Historia, encouraged by Henry VII and fi rst published in 1534-yet even this history has yet to be completely edited.Inventing Inventors is divided into eight chapters following a brief preface.Chapter 1, the introduction, defi nes this study's terms and surveys previous scholarship.Atkinson translates inventores as "inventors" and inventio as "invention," in preference to Copenhaver's "discovery" and Weiss and Pérez's "beginnings and discoveries."Th e De inventoribus participates in a longstanding tradition, that of heurematography: the history of technical and scientifi c inventions and discoveries.Yet this emerges as only one of several facets of the complex inventor topos, as Atkinson traces it in Chapter 2, from Antiquity and Jewish thought through Vergil's own times, when the problem is philological-preoccupied with naming inventions with linguistic exactitude-rather than the kind of natural-scientifi c methodology it would become from the seventeenth century onward.His life as an Italian-born churchman, diplomat, and humanist author who spent most of his career in England

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.