Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Graduate Student, Classe di Lettere
Université Paris Descartes, GEPECS
Thesis Title: Writing history in 16th-century France: Jean Bodin's "Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem". With a critical edition and a new Italian translation.
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Michele Ciliberto
Yves-Charles Zarka |
About
My doctoral research mainly concerns natural and civil history-writing in Europe, and more particularly in France, during the second half of the 16th-century. I am especially interested in the efforts made by European scholars to establish civil history as a science, in reaction to an everlasting Pyrrhonian trend confining it to the realm of the uncertain.
For my final dissertation, I am preparing a critical edition and an Italian translation of Jean Bodin's "Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem", a treatise explaining how to «cull the flowers of histories» and draw the best results from a methodical reading of ancient and modern historians. The "Methodus", first published in 1566, was favourably welcomed by the scholarly community and rapidly came to be regarded as a classic of its genre, thus enjoying several reprints throughout all of Europe in the following decades. The first of these reprints, published in Paris in 1572, included a number of authorial variants that have never been studied so far and that I take into account in my dissertation in order to reconstruct the evolution of Bodin's thought in a crucial stage of its development (six years after this second edition, his political masterpiece - the "Six livres de la République" - will appear in Paris).
For several reasons, it seemed to me that the "Methodus" would offer an ideal vantage point for my research. Its 500 pages in-4° directly address many of the most relevant historiographical issues debated during the Renaissance; besides, the considerable intellectual stature of its author, the latter's careful use of sources, and the way in which such diverse disciplinary areas as cosmography, geography, meteorology, numerology, chronology, and linguistics are successfully intermingled with political and legal issues, all contribute to making it the most advanced 16th-century French work on historical thought, and perhaps one of the most intriguing accomplishments of all French Renaissance philosophy.
