Lecture: “Translating and Illuminating the City of God: France-Italy, 14th-15th Century”
Elisa Brilli (University of Toronto)
This lecture is presented in partnership with the Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies
The anonymous translation of Augustine’s City of God made in Florence at the very end of the 14th century, or the beginning of the 15th constitutes a fundamental chapter, though usually neglected, of the Medieval and Early Modern reception of this masterpiece. It may also represent an important chapter in the history of Florentine Civic Humanism because its complex relations help us to grasp, on the one hand, the Augustinian revival in Europe and, on the other, the cultural program developed at the court of King Charles V of France, where the City of God had been translated, commented, and beautifully illuminated a century earlier (1375).
Elisa Brilli teaches Medieval Italian Literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Firenze e il Profeta. Dante tra Teologia e Politica (Carocci, 2012), and the main editor of the critical edition of the Alphabetum Narrationum by Arnold of Liège (Brepols, 2015). She co-edited Faire l’Anthropologie historique du Moyen Âge (Atelier du CHR, 2010) with P.-O. Dittmar and B. Dufal and Images and Words in Exile. Avignon and Italy During the First Half of the Fourteenth Century (SISMEL, 2015) with L. Fenelli and G. Wolf.