GEMS is hosting a talk by Dr. Francesco Caruso on Angelo Poliziano and the encyclopedic ideal.
March 5, 2025
3 – 4PM
Camelot (Room 3.30, Blandijnberg 2)
For early humanists, engaging with the classics was an integral part of their intellectual activity. The inventory of what remained after the shipwreck of the ancient world became the battlefield where “the best minds of three generations” clashed, in the attempt of incorporating this or that author to their range of expertise. In the late 1480s, during the opening of the academic year at the University of Florence, the Tuscan poet and humanist Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) delivered a prologue, the Panepistemon. This work implicitly certified that the efforts of his predecessors had been short-sighted. Not only did they demonstrate a limited or non-existent knowledge of the Greek language, but they also focused on a narrow range of ancient authors, mostly poets, historians, and orators. For Poliziano, this highlighted the need to create a vast encyclopedic project to reorganize the entire intellectual heritage of Greek and Latin output, including, among others, philosophy, sciences, and the law.
Dr. Francesco Caruso has a double background, legal and literary. He graduated from the School of Law in Palermo and holds a MA from University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. His main areas of research are the Italian Quattrocento, Neo-Latin literature and intellectual history. He has primarily published on Boccaccio and Poliziano, to whose intellectual biography he devoted his dissertation. He currently teaches Italian language and literature in the International Baccalaureate Program at the Gonzaga Campus in Palermo and works also as a professional translator. His current projects concern Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses but he is also conducting archival research on the Hortus Catholicus, one of Europe’s earliest botanical gardens.
