{"title":"Wisdom and Purple: Pope Alexander VII and Libraries","authors":"M. Misiti","doi":"10.1086/710285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710285","url":null,"abstract":"This essay focuses on Pope Alexander VII’s predilection and talent for books and libraries—his private library, the Vatican Library, and the Alessandrina Library, specifically the Sapienza University. Despite the large number of studies often dedicated to specific aspects of his diplomatic mission in Europe, Alexander VII’s milieu has in many regards not yet been fully explored. A complete investigation of his intellectual life—including his mother’s and his uncle’s roles in his Sienese education, the first steps in his Roman career, and his friends and collaborators—is still lacking. The contribution to the Biblioteca Vaticana of 1779 manuscripts from the Urbino Library, the care of his Chigiana Library, and the foundation of the Sapienza University Library in Rome reflect his multidisciplinary interests and his relations with the most celebrated intellectuals, poets, and savants around him, including Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, Lucas Holstenius, Athanasius Kircher, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Leone Allacci, Ferdinando Ughelli, Giano Nicio Eritreo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Francesco Borromini.","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"511 - 520"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710285","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43592395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams, The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 168. £17.49 (paper).","authors":"Caterina Cardamone","doi":"10.1086/710302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710302","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"563-565"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710302","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44877477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Panofsky on Architecture, Part II: Mental Habits, Disguised Symbolism, and the “Spell of Circularity”","authors":"Daniel Sherer","doi":"10.1086/710281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710281","url":null,"abstract":"The first part of this essay traced the development of Panofsky’s approach to architecture, emphasizing the medium-specific, intermedium, and semantic components of his analyses from his 1920 dissertation to his receptions of Warburg’s iconology, Cassirer’s Neo-Kantianism, and Riegl’s formalism. The sequel addresses Panofsky’s contributions to architectural history by following the evolution of two ideas: first, the notion of mental habits connecting Gothic style to Scholasticism; second, the concept of “disguised symbolism” introduced in the essay on the Arnolfini Wedding (1934) and reelaborated in Early Netherlandish Painting (1953). In these works Panofsky read the representation of architecture as a partly concealed symbolic order in fifteenth-century Flemish paintings in which Romanesque structures were opposed to Gothic structures as symbols of the Old Dispensation and the New. The analysis then shifts, returning to the theme of the circle versus the ellipse as bearers of implicit meaning in the essay “Galileo as a Critic of the Arts” (1956). In this text, Kepler’s astronomy figures as a parallel to instances of elliptical geometry in late Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Panofsky’s interest in the signification of the ellipse in connection with Kepler initially took root in the Warburg Library in Hamburg. There, the elliptical reading room provided an architectural metaphor for the triumph of Western rationality, simultaneously exemplifying the idea of built form as a bearer of meaning and as an arena of scholarship in which Panofsky laid the groundwork for his iconological method in the 1920s.","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"435 - 466"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710281","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41931424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 472. US$35.00 (cloth).","authors":"T. Weststeijn","doi":"10.1086/710288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710288","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"526-528"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710288","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42998490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"C. Oliver O’Donnell, Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art through a Modern American Mind. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. 272. $99.95 (cloth).","authors":"J. Elsner","doi":"10.1086/710303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710303","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"565-567"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710303","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46783948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Seripando Library of Naples","authors":"I. Rowland","doi":"10.1086/710284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710284","url":null,"abstract":"In 1560, the Augustinian cardinal Girolamo Seripando commissioned a chapel and library in the church of San Giovanni a Carbonara in Naples. In the late fifteenth century, this congregation had taken a distinctive intellectual path, harmonizing humanistic study with Christian faith. Seripando’s collection provided a living, systematic reflection of how Observant Augustinian thought had emerged from, and complemented, the humanist movement over the course of several generations, to emerge as a politically independent contemporary Christian theology profoundly rooted in classical literature and the legacy of Plato, seen through the lens of Augustine, the thirteenth-century Augustinian theologian Giles of Rome, and Seripando’s influential mentor, the Augustinian prior general and cardinal Giles of Viterbo.","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"497 - 510"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710284","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46763445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The History of Humanities in Time of Lockdown","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/710275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710275","url":null,"abstract":"his issue has been created in difficult times, as the COVID-19 pandemic has kept much of the world’s population under lockdown. Research in the history of humanities has proceeded in circumstances that are far from ideal. In what we still consider as normal times, libraries, archives and universities would be open and easily accessible, but now they are not, although library staff at various universities and elsewhere have been very helpful inmakingmaterial available digitally. Everybody contributing to this issue—our authors, reviewers, library staff, and the people working at the University of Chicago Press on editing, production, and communication—were restricted in many ways and yet have been able to do splendid work. We would like to express our deep gratitude to all of them.","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"307 - 307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710275","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46983189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"John E. Joseph, Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x+282. £88.99 (cloth).","authors":"Lin Chalozin-Dovrat","doi":"10.1086/710286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710286","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"521-523"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710286","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42607033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Offprints: Modern Media of Academic Sociability","authors":"Carlos Spoerhase","doi":"10.1086/710279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710279","url":null,"abstract":"What is an offprint and why was it important in the humanities? This article will approach this question in five steps. Following some terminological remarks and an overview of the format’s history, it examines the offprint’s different uses through major offprint collections held at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. This informs a praxeological analysis of the format and circulation of offprints in the humanities. Finally, I consider contemporary nostalgia for the offprint, due not only to the ongoing digitalization of media, but also to the fact that interactions centered on the offprint used to bolster a particular self-image of the scholarly persona.","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"383 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710279","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46932768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Joep Leerssen, Comparative Literature in Britain: National Identities, Transnational Dynamics 1800–2000. Studies in Comparative Literature 27. Cambridge: LEGENDA (Modern Humanities Research Association), 2019. Pp. 272. £75.00.","authors":"B. Bagchi","doi":"10.1086/710299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710299","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36904,"journal":{"name":"History of Humanities","volume":"5 1","pages":"554-556"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710299","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48124195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}