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Renaissance Readers and Their Books: Representations of a Fugitive Act

Renaissance Readers and Their Books: Representations of a Fugitive Act

Webinar

Dr. Antonio Ricci
Associate Professor of Humanities
York University

Sunday, March 7 | 2:00PM EDT

ZOOM Webinar | Registration Required

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

The image of a person holding a book appears frequently in Renaissance art and literature. The privileged status of texts in humanist culture and their proliferation after the coming of print technology contributed to the motif’s popularity.

This lecture will examine depictions of readers in paintings and poems of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The intention is to recover aspects of the experience of reading during the period and, at the same time, to gain a measure of insight into what remains an elusive phenomenon. What does reading mean?

What is it, really, that we are doing when we engage in this fundamentally human act? The Renaissance offers us intriguing answers.

ANTONIO RICCI

Antonio Ricci holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He is currently an Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Humanities at York University, and he has also taught at Fordham University. He is a book historian with research interests in the print culture of Renaissance Italy, particularly the publishing industry in sixteenth-century Florence and the printing history of the Orlando Furioso. 

His essays include “Real Presences: Literature and Artifacts in Early Modern Italy” (in Rituals of Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir, eds. M. Jurdjevic & R. Strom-Olsen, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2016, 235–257), “The Business of Print in Ducal Florence: The Case of Anton Francesco Doni” (in Dissonanze Discordi, ed. G. Rizzarelli, Il Mulino, 2013, 45–70), and “The Renaissance in Toronto: Early Modern Italian Books in the Collections of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library” (Renaissance and Reformation 37, 2014, 181–212). He is the recipient of grants from the Newberry Library, the Houghton Library, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (doctoral, postdoctoral, Connection), and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Presented by the Canadian Institute for Mediterranean Studies in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto. Funded by Joe Di Geso, co-sponsored by the Toronto and Ottawa Chapters, with the support of the College of the Humanities, Carleton University.