Dr. Jeffrey White, emeritus professor of classical languages, will have an article published this month in Aevum, the humanities journal of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan: “Last Summer in Tuscany: 1462.” 

 

The essay seeks to contextualize within contemporary events the composition and matter of a supplement (previously unstudied) to his Italia illustrata of Biondo Flavio. Biondo’s It. Ill. is a cultural geography, or “chorography,” of the old Roman province of Italia: the Italian peninsula, conceived of for the first time, centuries before Mazzini, as a cultural — and, at least potentially, political — unity. 

 

Biondo Flavio, intimate and advisor of Pius II, was in Tuscan country places then with Pius and the peripatetic Church government (Curia), in which he participated as papal secretary, continuing a life-long program of antiquarian and historical researches (including the supplement) and eluding plague. He died in June of the following year, at 71. 

 

The essay was completed over the pestilential year 2020-2021, with kind and essential help from the librarians of the Friedsam Memorial Library and of the Technology Services staff of St. Bonaventure University.