2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

tory was fanned by many things: Italian humanists were interested
in the history of the peninsula, while further to the North Catholic-
Protestant disputes generated an eager curiosity about the history of
the early church; there was also rising interest in the history of the
Goths as ancestors of the Germans. The phases of the reception of
Agathias’ epigrams are hard to disentangle from the general history
of the reception of the Greek Anthology, of which they were a part.
This collection so permeated Renaissance literature that it is almost
impossible to account for its full impact. My study consists of a narrative
about the reception of Agathias, some unpublished prologues
of the translator Cristophorus Persona, and a complete bibliographical
survey of all the Latin versions of Agathias’ works.
The Rare Book library of Columbia University was invaluable
for me in surveying the early prints of the Latin Agathias. And
with the guidance of Professor Carmela Vircillo Franklin, I was
introduced to the Medieval and Renaissance studies community
at Columbia; their various events (lecture series, conferences, etc.)
were very informative and inspiring to my work.
Réka Forrai takes up a three-year post-doctoral Fellowship at the Centre for
Medieval Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense.
Marianne Koos
These four months at the Italian Academy were a very intense time.
The stay offered me the precious and exceptional opportunity to
develop in a calm, concentrated as well as scientifically most lively
atmosphere my research on the phenomenon of Italian Renaissance
images of love that were hitherto unrecognized (or not recognized
as such). These images of love do not correspond—as they usually
might—to any mythological source, but are instead rooted in nonnarrative
early modern love poetry. In particular, I was conducting
research on portrayals of love which because of their attributes or
symbols have until now been misidentified as ambiguous representations
of religious subjects. Continuing an investigation into
further examples of this kind, during my stay at the Italian Academy
I decided to concentrate on a panel by the Ferrarese court painter
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