Einführung und Moderation: Bernhard Huss

Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna’s Rationarium vite, completed in 1400, is the first full-length autobiography written in the Latin west after Augustine’s Confessions. Despite this remarkable fact, Conversini’s work received only sporadic attention in accounts of early humanism or the history of autobiography. This presentation will seek to elucidate the Rationarium’s significance to the culture of early Italian humanism by examining it in light of Petrarch’s elaborate – yet fragmentary – autobiographical corpus. The presentation will concentrate on three interrelated issues:
1. Conversini’s use of self-writing as an ethical practice aimed at fashioning himself as a free and autonomous subject.
2. His adherence to the Petrarchan project of establishing humanism as a textual community bent on critiquing contemporary society and its corrupt institutions.
3. Conversini’s ongoing oscillation between two different ideals of selfhood in his self-representation: while he often lauds his Franciscan-like compassionate and soft nature, Conversini at the same time repeatedly exalts Stoic virility and self-control as the true essence of humanity.

In Zusammenarbeit mit dem EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”

Die Veranstaltung wird per WebEx Event digital übertragen, bitte registrieren Sie sich bis Montag, 26. Oktober per Mail an bernhard.huss@fu-berlin.de. Die Zugangsdetails gehen Ihnen dann einen Tag vor der Veranstaltung zu.