News

In 2013–14 a new ERC–Starting Investigator project will get underway at the Universities of Verona (Italy) and Warwick. Led by Dr Marco Sgarbi, the project will last 5 years and will centre on ‘Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular: Rethinking Renaissance and Early-Modern Intellectual History (c. 1400– c. 1650)’

With funding of almost 1.5M euros, this project will offer a series of studies of how Aristotle’s writings—on logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics and rhetoric—were interpreted in the Renaissance by individuals who used Italian as opposed to Latin, which was the common language of the universities and of learned scholarship. Academies, courts, and other contexts will thus feature strongly as the contexts in which translations, commentaries, dialogues and other works on Aristotle were written and disseminated to a broad audience, whether in manuscript or print.

The ERC project will avail itself of the findings of the current AHRC project running at Warwick (Italian/Renaissance Centre, PI David Lines, Co-I Simon Gilson) and at The Warburg Institute in London (Co-I Jill Kraye) on ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy’. Among other results, this project has led to a publicly accessible database listing all the vernacular works produced on Aristotle in Italy between c. 1400 and c. 1650. Lines and Gilson will lead the Warwick-based part of the ERC-grant, which will include two research fellows and one PhD student. The team in Verona will include the PI and four research fellows. Advertisements for these positions will appear in the near future on jobs.ac.uk.