Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe

Polydore Vergil's 'De inventoribus rerum'

by Catherine Atkinson

Book cover: Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe

Extent: 325 pages

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Subjects: Religious Studies

Series: Spatmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation / Studies in the Late Middle Ages, Humanism and the Reformation

Series volume number: 33

Language: English

(Hardback) (Published)

(February 2007)

ISBN: 9783161491870

Price: $149.00

On back order

Polydore Vergil of Urbino (ca.1470-1555) fired his readers’ imagination with his encyclopaedic book On the inventors of all things ( De inventoribus rerum 1499). His account of the manifold origins of sciences, crafts and social institutions is a praise of man’s inventive genius and a prototypical cultural history. Polydorus was a household name for several centuries. Erasmus envied his friend the book’s success, Rabelais heaped scorn on it, Catholic censors put it on the index, while Protestants were fascinated with that papist work. In this first in-depth study of the Renaissance ‘bestseller’, Catherine Atkinson examines not only the Italian humanist’s bona fide (mostly ancient) inventors, in books I-III, she enquires into the neglected and misunderstood, yet equally important, books IV-VIII (1521). This early modern text, written on the eve of the Reformation, is devoted to the highly controversial topic of the ‘invention’ of ecclesiastical institutions. The priest and humanist Vergil, who during his 50 years in England rose in the church hierarchy, is shown to be an acute observer of contemporary religious practice. He employs the inventor question (who was the first to do this?) as an instrument of historiography and by comparing medieval church rites and institutions with religious practice of antiquity, implicitly questions the singularity of the Christian church.

  • By (author) Catherine Atkinson