Tonight I've pulled myself away from other things long enough to realize again I've put this off too many times. There's too much to list and not enough explanation of absence. But there's a slew of new books started and lines of notes made and a few more things coming into focus, so some account of those need to be shown.
An older, slim edition on
Moorish Spain (1992) by Richard Fletcher seems already to reaffirm what I learned twenty years ago but at least acts as a refresher. It will shed some light on some contexts for a few more sources.
The dynamic expansionist press from the Ottoman Turks in the east, as depicted in
The Histories, and sprung again from the fifteenth century hand of Laonikos Chalkokondyles, was recently published with a companion volume,
A New Herodotus (2014), by The Dumbarton Oaks trustees at Harvard. This preparatory unrolling here by our editor and translator, Anthony Kaldellis, for the Chalkokondyles text is especially necessary because of who Chalkokondyles may have been and what he was attempting to do.
Laonikos Chalkokondyles says he was born an Athenian in the years marking the great many series of defeats by the overwhelming Ottoman forces mid-century . His own noteworthy family (if his biographer Kyriacus - Cyriac of Ancona - can be believed) was exiled from that famed city when little Laonikos was perhaps five or six. Yet with his familial connections he went to school and studied in Mistra under the Greek philosopher western tradition remembers as
Plethon. There, Laonikos learned a form of Greek neoplatonism and Latin, Italian, and ancient Greek, and likely, Turkish as well.
Kaldellis calls him 'New Herodotus' because his work so carefully uses templates of both Herodotus and Thucydides (pagan Greeks though they were) in telling his story of his times. This was the end of the Greek control of what he called Byzantion, then known widely to Christians as Constantinople and for our times, Istanbul. We know of him now because Anthony Kaldellis and the Dumbarton Oaks have published a text and translation of Chalkokondyles' careful, if unfinished work, and also have produced this fine, yet carefully measured draught of Anthony Kaldellis. There is much untangled here.
Another strange yet penetrating and compelling look from the fifteenth century comes to us as autocrats today get around to tell us what they want now that they have all the money. In a format now considered classic but which, when it was produced was considered novel, is Aurelio Brandolini's
Republics and Kingdoms Compared, also by a Harvard Press subsidiary (2009). Another dialogue of explication for 'edification', this rare thing was produced only twice. Once in dedication to Lorenzo de Medici 1492/4 and again for his son (the future Pope Leo X) some time in the following decade. The subject matter avoids, and yet, neatly dovetails that of Nicolo Machiavelli's two most famous works,
The Prince, and
The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy. And precedes them by at least two decades. I look forward to it with anticipation.
Still, it is nothing less than mesmerizing how Natalie Zemon Davis' modern day
Trickster Travels (2006) looks at the many reflections and
activities around the various depictions then of Africa and Europe. These studies again will be prelude to other research.
The biographies of Erasmus and
Luther continue with both their arcs at the cusp or in the ascendant swing in their respective lives. At some point I would also like to look at the long life of Ximenes de Cisneros to get a greater sense of his take and influence on Christian ecclesia. Also will follow some English perspective with near-contemporary lives of Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey. A biography of someone with the stature of John Colet also needs investigating.
Stories of exploration and mercantile quests, as in Hugh Thomas'
Rivers of Gold, or, the
Letters of Hernan Cortes will reveal motivations and methods, changing practices with both hasty and planned out solutions.
In England, the story continues there with
The Early Tudors, as well as
German Histories In the Age of Reformation as time allows.
Leaders in the
book trade in Venice, like Manutius, will be returned to, as its historians like Bembo and Sanudo.
Exiles on parade in Florence have much to talk about via Francesco Filelfo, and, more correspondence from Italy, this time from Lorenzo Valla who connects many names and stories. Anecdotes of Poggio Bracciolini will continue. Girolamo
Savonarola still makes his case. He will come to an end with that and
Florence will see to it.
Another title new to me looks at
Convent Chronicles noting changing norms among Conventuals in German lands. And much more. So if it looks like I've done little with the blog it's because I've been busy elsewhere.
