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The Secret of Secrets: The East Slavic Version Introduction, Text, Annotated Translation, and Slavic Index
The original Arabic Secret of Secrets was probably compiled from multiple sources, and dates from about the tenth century. It purports to be the advice of Aristotle to his pupil Alexander the Great on all the knowledge - political, ethical, military, medical, and occult - needed by a great king. It was translated into Latin, Hebrew, and many European languages. It has been described as one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. The Hebrew version was translated into a variety of East Slavic, probably in Kiev before 1483. This idiosyncratic version contains major...

This volume presents six papers from a one-day colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in February 2015 on the legacy of Aldus Manutius, marking the 500th anniversary of his death, together with three additional contributions. Rather than examining Aldus’s own output, the nine papers focus on how the notion of ‘Aldine books’ has changed over 500 years in Europe and North America, from the early days of the Aldine press to modern and contemporary book collecting and the antiquarian trade. The volume also includes a catalogue of the exhibition ‘Collecting the Renaissance: The Aldine Press (1494–1598)’, held in the...

The encyclopedic compilation Liber Floridus, created by the Flemish canon Lambert of Saint-Omer in the early twelfth century, survives not only in the form of his famous autograph, but also in a considerable number of later manuscripts which transformed the knowledge assembled by him and which became starting points for new appraisals of their texts and images. Shaping Knowledge examines the processes which determined this transfer over the centuries and evaluates the specific achievements of the different generations of scribes and illuminators. Taking account of the full range of manuscripts which transmit material from the Liber Floridus and focusing in more detail on three of them – now in the Herzog August...

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) worked over many years on his long historical text about the Lives of ancient Roman military heroes, De viris illustribus (On Famous Men). Left unfinished at his death, the text was completed by 1379 by Petrarch’s colleague, Lombardo della Seta. Within a decade, De viris illustribus was translated into Italian; and in 1476 the Libro degli uomini famosi was printed in Poiano outside of Verona by the eccentric humanist and scribe, Felice Feliciano (1433–1479/1480). The edition includes a peculiar feature: preceding each of the Lives is a page on which is printed an interlace woodcut border within which, however, no image appears.
The present book surveys the...


Albinia de la Mare (1932–2001), OBE, FBA, Professor of Palaeography at King's College London, was one of the last century's outstanding palaeographers and the world's leading authority on Italian Renaissance manuscripts. In November 2011 a conference was held at King's College and the Warburg Institute to honour her memory, and this volume offers revised versions of most of the papers read on that occasion, as well as three additional contributions. Tilly de la Mare had exceptionally wide interests, including key individuals involved in manuscript and literary production, as represented here by studies on Vespasiano da Bisticci, Sozomeno da Pistoia, Matteo Contugi da Volterra, Lorenzo di Francesco Guidetti, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci,...

Ex Oriente lux – the Sun rises in the East and pours its light over the world; and the result, in Latin usage, is ‘lumen’ – the luminescence that the whole area lit by the lux is suffused with.
Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at the conference Ex Oriente lux - The Transfer of Scientific Knowledge from the Near East to Europe, held at the University of Córdoba in 2015 and organised jointly by the Córdoba Near Eastern Research Unit (CNERU) and the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe (...

In 2008-2009 a group of Arnaldo Momigliano’s disciples met at the Warburg Institute to celebrate the centenary of his birth and to recall the great series of seminars held by him from 1967 to 1983: the aim was to explore the significance of his legacy some twenty years after his death, in all the various areas where he made a major contribution. His seminars had opened the eyes of the participants to the meaning of historical research in their different fields, from ancient Jewish, Greek and Roman history and late antiquity to the study of the historiography especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributors to this volume have all asked how far his influence still determines the future of our various special areas...

The first volume of the Arabica Veritas series contains sixteen papers divided between two sections, dealing respectively with beliefs and practices characterising the Late Antique period before the emergence of the new order of Islam in the Near East, and with the cultural issues within Islam and in Christian Europe, especially after the impact of Arabic writings. Most of the papers edited here were first presented at the International Seminar on Cultural Transfer of Knowledge in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, held in November 2012 at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Córdoba, as an opening academic activity of the Córdoba Near Eastern Research Unit (CNERU).
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