Gerolamo Tiraboschi
(Gerolamo or Girolamo Tiraboschi; Bergamo, 1731-Modena, 1794) Italian scholar.At fifteen he entered the Society of Jesus, where he remained until its dissolution.He taught at the Milanese academy of Brera, and in 1770 he was appointed prefect of the Estense Library by Francisco III, Duke of Modena.The large number of sources at his disposal allowed him to compose works of considerable scholarship; the main one was the History of Italian Literature (1772-1781).
Girolamo Tiraboschi
He later became the official advisor of the new duke, Hercules III.He expanded the Estense Library and belonged to various academic entities.Tiraboschi also wrote a series of works on the arts, letters and the historical evolution of Modena.His minor texts include Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta (1766), Biblioteca modenese (1781-86), Memorie storiche modenesi (1793-1794) and Dizionario topografico-storico degli Stati Estensi (posthumous, 1824-25).
Published from 1772 to 1781 and corrected and revised between 1787 and 1794, the Historia de Girolamo Tiraboschi's Italian literature is the most important of the 18th century, and due to the abundance, precision and complexity of its material it is still very useful today.Written at the time of a Gravina and a Muratori, however, it does not respond to the new demands of the critical spirit.A history of Italian literature that put these first allusions to the autonomy of the work of art to the test was a necessity that even foreigners noticed.Leibniz incited Count Magliabechi to start work of this kind; Menckenius published in Leipzig (1736) the Life of Angelo Poliziano ; De Sade, in Amsterdam (1764), the Memoirs of the life of Francesco Petrarca .
All these works served to stimulate Girolamo Tiraboschi, but they did not give him a clear idea of the concept of "literature".In his opinion, the history of Italian letters had to coincide with the history of the origins and progress of all the sciences in Italy, and faithful to this criterion he submerged the heroes of poetry in the tide of cultural history, joining them with theologians, physicians, mathematicians and astrologers and with the multitude of mediocre and minimal.
After the first two volumes, where following purely geographical criteria he talks about letters in Etruria, in South Italy, and finally about Latin literature (which occupies more than half of the first volume and the entire second), Tiraboschi conducts his narrative until approximately 1200 in the third volume, and in the fourth until 1300.
The structure of the volumes is quite similar: after a general look at the "state of Italy "in the century he is dealing with, the author examines the vicissitudes of the Universities, talks about libraries, travel, sacred studies, philosophy and mathematics, medicine, civil and ecclesiastical jurisprudence, history , foreign languages, Italian poetry, Latin poetry, grammar and eloquence, the liberal arts, and so on.After the "Trecento" the work is nothing more than the history of Petrarchism, dominating the figure of Petrarch throughout Humanism and the Renaissance, and until the last years of the Seven hundred.Despite its flaws, Tiraboschi's History of Italian Literature was a good success; Published in 1781, it had a second edition (Rome, 1782), which was followed by many others.
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