Imaginary Archives of the Renaissance

Date / time: 30 March, 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Imaginary Archives of the Renaissance

Professor Filippo de Vivo’s inaugural lecture shows how archives are much more than stores of sources for modern historians. They grew as a result of centuries of non-neutral selection, preservation and discarding. And as such, they always inspired fantasies: of control, omniscience, continuity, survival as well as fracture and loss. Faced with new challenges, the Renaissance elaborated new archival fictions and fears in Italy and the world.

To book a place:  https://cis.bbk.ac.uk/apex/a02u/f?p=810:100:0:::100:P100_EV_ID:10155

Location: B34, Birkbeck, University of London, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX

Filippo de Vivo studied in Milan, Paris and Cambridge before coming to Birkbeck in 2003. He is the author of Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (2007) and Patrizi, informatori, barbieri (2012); he co-edited Exploring Cultural History (2010), Archivi e archivisti in Italia (2015), Fonti per la storia degli archivi italiani (2016) and several special issues on Scribal Culture in Italy, 1450-1700, Scholarly Practices in the Archive, Shared Spaces and Knowledge Transactions in the Italian Renaissance City, Archival Transformations in Early Modern Europe, The Thirty Years War and the News. He has written on the history of rumours, books and information, pharmacies and walking practices, and is currently researching Anglo-Venetian relations and a history of archives in late medieval and early modern Italy. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-staff/academic-staff/filippodevivo/