Cluster welcomes Dr. Giacchino Curiello to Work on a yet un-edited Manuscript of Bishop Robert Grosseteste!
Dr Giacchino Curiello has obtained a British Academy funded three – year scholarship, to begin this September, to work with Dr. Jack Cunningham on the yet unedited work of Grosseteste ‘The Divine Names’.
Dr Curiello obtained a Bachelor in Theology at the Studio Teologico “Collegio Alberoni” and then studied philosophy at the University of Parma in Italy. During those years he published articles on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. After a Master of Philosophy in Leuven, he received a joint doctorate from the University of Salerno (Italy) and the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). The title and topic of his PhD thesis’ was Robert Grosseteste on God as Principle and End of Creation.
During the work at BGU funded by a British Academy Fellowship he will work toward the first critical edition of Robert Grosseteste’s “Translation of and Commentary on The Divine Names.” The edition will provide new and concrete textual material for a complete assessment of Pseudo-Dionysius’s contribution to Grosseteste’s thought and his legacy in Late Medieval and Renaissance philosophy and theology. Particular attention will be paid to the nature of evil and the relationship between Neo-Platonic doctrines and some of the heresies that Grosseteste had to deal with during his episcopacy.
PhD student from the University of Bologna visiting BGU to study commentaries of Aristotle
From mid October 2017 to late January 2018, the School of Humanities and the Cluster hosted Irene Iarocci, a PhD student in the History of Political Thought from the University of Bologna, Italy. She was enrolled as a guest staff member of the university and was supervised during that time by Dr. Robert von Friedeburg.
As the main part of her research activity, she worked at a comparison between two commentaries of Aristotle’s Politics: one by Leonardo Bruni (Aristotelis Stagiritae politicorum sive de republica libri octo, Leonardo Aretino interprete, Roma, 1492), the other by Pietro Vettori (Petri Vectorii commentarii in VIII libros Aristotelis De optimo statu civitatis positis ante singulas declarationes graecis verbis auctoris, iisdemque ad verbum latinum expressis, Florentiae, apud Iuntas, 1576).
The main aim of her work with Dr. von Friedeburg was to investigate how and to which extent, between the 15th and the 16th centuries, the different choices to translate key concepts of the Politics from Greek into Latin (such as πόλις, κοινωνία, and πολιτεία) marked a shift in early modern political thought and subsequently an evolution in the meaning and use of the concept of res publica.
In order to pursue her research, she studied at the BGU library, and at the British Library, and made researches at the Lincoln Cathedral libraries (Exchequergate and Wren), working on early modern editions of Aristotle’s Politics.
