The Humanities Center Seminar in the History of the Book and Houghton Library, Harvard University, are pleased to present the following lecture by Professor Angela Nuovo of the Universita di Udine:
Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601) and His Library: Book Collecting and the Republic of Letters in Late Renaissance Italy
Thursday, October 14, 5pm
Barker Center 133
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
With approximately 9,000 printed texts and 700 manuscripts, the library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli is one of the most remarkable Italian book collections brought together according to the ideals of the Respublica Litteraria. To manage and make available such a vast collection, Pinelli used a complex bibliographical organization, which he perfected thanks to the study of many contemporary libraries. A library of this size offers many opportunities to learn about the writing and reading habits of a scholar of the time; it also offers a deeper look into the nature and motivations of Pinelli’s atypical personality, for Pinelli’s papers include notes on a broad range of subjects. They are often immediate records of thoughts, exceptionally close to speech. Angela Nuovo will speak on this exceptional library and will discuss a few examples of the notes in which Pinelli kept scrupulous track of every fragment of conversations he had and of information he found.
Angela Nuovo is Associate Profossor of Bibligraphy and Library Economy at the Universita di Udine, Italy. Her numerous publications include Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Milano, Franco Angeli, 2003) concerning Renaissance Italian booksellers.
For details, contact Caroline Duroselle-Melish.