Flavio Biondo's "Italia Illustrata": Representations of Spatial Language and Spatial Thinking in Text and Maps

Biondo's approach to history and topography of Italy, his struggling with ancient sources and places and his desire to show the mutations since antiquity have attracted much attention in recent years. The workshop is part of the project "Historical spaces in texts and maps. A cognitive-semantic analysis of Flavio Biondo's "Italia illustrata". We assume that Biondo's text serves as a (cognitive) map, a textual coordinate system enabling readers to travel mentally the different regions of Italy. Hence, it presents a detailed geographical description of actual and metaphorical spatial cues. The text offers a number of anchoring points, that is, it amounts to spatial references encoding explicitly actual sites, landmarks, buildings, roads, rivers, streets, but also spatial frames of reference and geometric encodings. But first and foremost the text is based on ancient authors such as Livy, Pliny or Strabo (the latter for the Latium chapter only). The aim of the workshop is to evaluate the usefulness of various approaches to Biondos work and the possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration. It brings together scholars of Biondo from different fields as philology, comparative literature, history, geography, cognitive-linguistics and history of art. The basic research questions thus are:
a) What kind of spatial information do we find in the text?
b) Which encodings serve as anchorage to construe a cognitive map?
c) Which maps might Biondo have used and what kind of maps actually existed?

Confermed speaker, who will present their current work and specific research interests, are: Raphael Berthele, Nathalie Bouloux, Klaus Geus, Günther Görz, Kurt Guckelsberger, Marc Laureys, Tanja Michalsky, Katharina Piechocki, Paolo Pontari, Francis Harvey, Kai-Florian Richter, Martin Thiering. The workshop is by invitation. Researchers with a strong interest in the topic who would like to attend should inquire in advance to Tanja Michalsky (Michalsky@biblhertz.it).

Organized by Tanja Michalsky and Martin Thiering

Hinweis: Diese Veranstaltung ist nicht öffentlich. Teilnahme nur mit Anmeldung möglich.