By Rachel Konieczny
News Editor
Jeffrey White, Ph.D., professor and chair of classical languages, recently finalized two scholarly publications on Latin cultural geographer Biondo Flavio.
Harvard University Press plans to publish the second volume of White’s book, titled “Biondo Flavio: Italy Illuminated,” on March 28. Leuven University Press plans to publish White’s essay, titled “Biondo Flavio as Henry James’s Dencombe: Revising the Italia Illustrata,” in April.
White first gained interest in Flavio while completing his doctoral dissertation at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1975. White wrote his dissertation on a text of Cicero’s and discovered Flavio, later deciding to pursue a full publication on the latter.
“It was a work that had been lost for 400 or 500 years and it was discovered in the north of Italy in a region called Lombardy,” White said of the Cicero text he was reading at the time. “This guy, Flavio Biondo, gave a description or a narrative about that discovery, how the text was recovered in a cathedral chancellery from rubbish and trash.”
White said he did extensive research for his book, including securing travel grants to conduct further research.
“I had to go to Italy, France, the Netherlands and England and examine the manuscripts because this thing was conceived and written before printing, so I had to find the manuscript witnesses of this text in Europe—all of them if I could,” White said. “Eventually I found all of them but one.”
White said his research also involved writing to the head libraries of the Vatican and Oxford and later visiting them to examine the manuscripts.
The “Italia Illustrata” includes the Latin text with English translations and notes on the text.
White said he approached his book by taking notes on all of the manuscripts and determining which ones can be eliminated. White said he began with 27 manuscripts.
“What I try to do is describe how this guy Flavio Biondo formulated the work, composed it and then also how he revised it because he continually revised it—he’s always changing it,” White said. “I had to figure out how many of the revisions in the manuscripts were actually his and how many of them had been done by other people.”
White said he hopes to travel and present a paper next spring in Chicago at the Renaissance Society of America. He plans to see how other scholars also used the texts of Flavio.
Harvard University Press published the first volume of White’s “Italy Illuminated” in 2005.
koniecrc14@bonaventure.edu
