The Centre hosts the following two speakers:

1. Dr Riccardo Montalto (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II), ‘From manuscripts to history: The reconstruction of the Greek manuscript library of Achilles Statius (1524-1581)’

Achilles Statius was a Portuguese humanist active in Rome in the second half of the sixteenth century. Committed to editorial and propaganda activities and, in particular, in the edition of the texts of the Fathers of the Greek Church, Statius set up one of the largest private libraries in Renaissance Rome, peculiar for its size and intellectual value. Starting from the material data detectable from the manuscripts, compared with the data available from different sources – primarily historical, archival and library science – the research aims to reconstruct a part of Achilles Statius’s library and to identify some methods and working practices of the late Renaissance humanists.

2. Victoria Lansing (Balliol, Oxford), ‘Evidence of Medieval Learning Communities in Manuscripts of the Consolatio Philosophiae’ 

I analyse the evidence of learning communities formed around Boethius’ Consolatio Philosophiae through manuscript evidence. My paper employs two case studies: 1) a novel interpretation of an illumination in BL. Harley 4335 and 2) an analysis of Ox.Auct.F.I.15, which contains neumatic notation of a Consolatio poem. In both cases, I contend that scribes are responding to reading and worshipping communities which employ the Consolatio as an educational text.