News

25/03/2021: Die Posie der Dinge 

The collected volume “Die Poesie der Dinge. Ziele und Strategien der Wissensvermittlung im lateinischen Lehrgedicht der Frühen Neuzeit” on Neo-Latin didactic poetry, edited by Ramunė Markevičiūtė and Bernd Roling, contains a contribution by Johanna Luggin, presenting the didactic and poetic strategies in a poem about the human brain, Cerebrum (1727), by Claude Griffet.

“Claude Griffets Cerebrum (1727), ein poetischer Führer durch das Gehirn”, pp. 185–203 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722826-010

01/12/2020: Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance

Ovanes Akopyan recently appeared on two podcasts to discuss his book entitled “Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem and Its Reception” (Brill, 2021). You can check out Ovanes’ conversations with Luis Ribeiro (University of Lisbon) and Dan Attrell (University of Toronto), respectively, on YouTube:

The Astra Project (with Luis Ribeiro) – Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance with Ovanes Akopyan  

The Modern Hermeticist (with Dan Attrell) – Debating the Stars - Pico Della Mirandola Against Astrology

For more information about the book have a look at Brill.com

01/12/2020: Archives of Natural History 42.7

The latest issue of Archives of Natural History 42.7 (2020) contains an article by our team member Dominik Berrens. In his paper, Dominik deals with early modern names of the sloth, an animal that was perceived as particularly strange in the early modern period. He tries to reconstruct how the given names and their etymologies were connected to the perceived behaviour and the physiognomy, and what this might tell us about the conceptions behind these.

“Naming an unknow animal the case of the sloth (Folivora)”, pp. 325–343

20/10/2020: Virtual Guest Talk Johanna Luggin at STVDIO seminar Warwick

On October, 20^th, our colleague Johanna Luggin gave a virtual guest talk at the STVDIO seminar of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick. She presented the peculiar reception of doctrines by philosopher René Descartes in two Neo-Latin didactic poems from the 18^th century – the Mundus Cartesii (“The World of Descartes”) written by Pierre le Coëdic SJ and the Cerebrum (“The Brain”) written by Claude Griffet SJ. These two works play with Cartesian theories as well as with the Virgilian and Lucretian subtexts, bending genre traditions and representing an intriguing mix of genuine fascination and subtle critique of the ideas of the 17^th century natural philosopher.

The talk was attended by the Renaissance Centre’s academic staff as well as PhD- and MA-students and inspired a discussion on i.a. the didactic function of these peculiar Neo-Latin texts.

For more information on the STVDIO seminar visit: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/news_and_events/seminars/stvdio

[news archive]

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Funding: European Research Council Advanced Grant
Principal Investigator: Martin Korenjak
Host Institution: Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck
Duration: 10/2017–09/2022
Project No. 741374
More information on ERC and CORDIS