Eduardo Fernández
@apocalypsisnova
historian working on early modern prophecies, belief and reading practices @warburginstitute.bsky.social | «Cerco un paese innocente
Sad I couldn't be there with my convent mates at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane who are celebrating their solemn profession (and yet so happy for them!). Thinking more and more of their cosmopolitanism, their resilience and generosity as they go into the world as friars!
Playing with comma.inria.fr found this fun variant in Orosius: "Ommitto Aethiopum interfectorem patris" with Aethiopum later corrected in Oedippum.
My favourite marriage of erudition and theoretical ambition
Especially because after finding this 18th century catalogue of it at the Archivio di Stato I really want to write an article about it
And that's a wrap! My time in Rome ended but before I had a chance to catalogue (with some help) the last 20 books from the library here, in Hebrew for the most part or in Arabic, like this rare sammelband combining rare 16th c prints of the Al-Ājarrūmiyya and the al-Kāfiya. Can't wait to come back!
The joy of visiting a library in Rome for the first time and the thrill of serendipities behind superficial catalog descriptions
I'm leaving Rome next week and thinking of Ungaretti's Girogavo from more than a hundred years ago. A ogni nuovo clima che incontro mi trovo languente che una volta già gli ero stato assuefatto E me ne stacco sempre straniero
Having some neyyappam after my first qurbana in Rome, full of synths, LEDs, and saris.
A kind of glue? I have worked with some manuscripts in which slips of paper (glued over the marginal notes, I believe) were used to hide a wealth of annotations.
Looking forward to presenting in Madrid this Tuesday a paper titled "Intellectual Genealogies of Marian Mystical Discourse: the Apocalypsis Nova between the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish Americas" (in excellent company! and just in time for San Isidro!)
Looking forward to this in Rome! "Marc Bloch. Letture dall'Italia" - 20-22 May.
Napoli L'Orientale: small photodump from the Jesuit Missions in Northern Abyssinia conference. So much cool stuff, Psalm 68:31 vibes.
18-month postdoctoral position in Florence (BNCF & INSR) linked to the curation of the incoming Sensi exhibition. Deadline: May 16 bncf.cultura.gov.it/amministrazi...
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal and preserve all knowledge for us, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words: scrape and store.
Wish me luck as I climb these once again after 15 years. Hope they have aged less or better than I have!
I'll be presenting in two weeks at a conference at L'Orientale that I feel genuinely excited about! Somewhat unexpectedly, I have managed to put something together on Ethiopian and European prophecies, connecting past and current research. Come say hello if you're in Naples this 4-5 May!
Coming from Gəʽəz class and wishing there was a Lingua Aethiopica Per Se Illustrata. Verbal morphology of Semitic languages go brrrr.
Biblioteca Angelica photo dump: random sanguigne, a schedone listing Natalie Zemon Davis checking the same ms., and an (to me) unexpected witness of the De hermaphrodito
The Jesuit passed some photocopies of it to Jean Aubin, who then passed it to Luís Filipe Thomaz. The Bonn copy, as far as I could is nowhere to be found, unsurprisingly after the closure of the Jesuit library in Bonn.
They were three before: Leite de Faria writes in 1977 that the director of the Imprensa Nacional, where Graça Barreto worked since age 15(!), destroyed their copy. Again, the Jesuits from the Bibliotheca Missionum register the passing of a copy from typesetter Dias Coelho to p. G. Schurhammer SJ.
A footnote from La Civiltà Cattolica in 1934 adds context: humidy destroyed all copies but two, which are missing some pages. This becomes more clear in 1951 thanks to the Jesuits from the Bibliotheca Missionum, who not only provide the actual title but the location of the surviving copies!
This, informally known as Documenta Habessinica, was Graça Barreto's planned 2,000-document collection on Portuguese-Ethiopian history, from the first Portuguese push into Abyssinia in the 15th century through João V's attempt to restore the patriarchate in the 18th. century. A landmark project.
After a minute, I realise it's this old volume of sources I had, Graça Barreto's appendix to the Bullario do padroado ultramarino focusing on Ethiopia. But the volume (n.b. Tomus II) does not list documents by number. And it was the first the come out, and in fact the only one.
Reading René Basset's" Deux lettres éthiopiennes du XVIe siècle" (1889) (a French translation of a memoria by Portuguese Ethiopianist Esteves Pereira and I start reading quotes from a collection of sources "Documenta Habessinica"...
Just learned of the Italian medieval surnames Fottivecchia, Tappaculo or Cacalosso; however, my actual favourite is by far Fotendarnus (fotte indarno)
Venerdì prossimo a Bologna parlerò della fine del mondo e la Venezia del Cinquecento insieme a Davide Scotto all'interno di un seminario intitolato "Da Acri a Costantinopoli: Riccoldo da Monte di Croce e Paolo Angelo sulla crisi del cristianesimo di fronte all’islam" www.fscire.it/lang/eng/whe...