Thomas Jefferson’s Italian and Italian-Related Library in the History of Universal Personal Rights (Video)
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- In a classroom in Newcomb Hall, what
- in those days was one of the sort of newfangled electronic classrooms,
- one afternoon in teaching a course on the history of Italian literature
- I projected onto the screen part of the text of Boccaccio's Decameron
- written in 1348. And the particular passage was a very
- well-known one from Day 4 Book 1
- in which Ghismonda justifies to her father, who is a prince,
- her taking as her lover a young man who is basically a sort of assistant in
- the stables. And she does so by saying that
- our creator made us all from the same mass of flesh, we were all born equal.
- And it struck me at that point how over 400 years before
- the writing of the Declaration of Independence, Boccaccio had
- given form to many- basically the same principles, many of
- the same points. So because of the time I was traveling
- to Washington DC regularly as a delegate to the National Council of
- the American Association of University Professors.
- On the next visit I went into the Library of Congress for a book room
- and I asked the director, who is a Jefferson expert,
- what research there was on Jefferson's Italian books because I was interested
- in knowing if he might have had the occasion to read Boccaccio's
- text. And he looked at me rather startled and
- he said, well there is none. So for about the next 15 years as
- I went twice a year to Washington DC, I was able to make some time especially
- in the summer to conduct research on Jefferson's own library. And
- the director was also kind enough to send me a copy of the four-volume
- catalog of Jefferson's library. And what became
- very clear was that he was a very sophisticated connoisseur,
- not only of Italian works written by
- Italians themselves, but by works published in Italy because Italy had
- been a very important publishing center through the middle
- ages and into the 18th century. And he was particularly interested in
- the history of philosophy and in works that had to do with
- self-government both of the individual and of the political entity and in
- particular in the Venetian Republic, which was the
- only one of the Italian medieval republics to remain
- in existence through the 18th century, and in fact was studied by a number of
- the Founding Fathers. And I was able to draw a number of
- connections between Jefferson's ideas and precepts
- and views about how governments should function to Italian works that he
- owned. Now it's something of an open question
- whether he already had these ideas and these works, reinforced
- them, or further developed them, or if some of
- these particular ideas he derived from the works.
- But his choice of book shows his very deep interest
- in these topics and his very great sophistication and knowledge about them.
- And so I wrote a summary of my findings in the book that I published in 2019 on
- Thomas Jefferson's Italian and Italian related library.
- And I called it an overview because my intention and hope
- is that people who have greater expertise in specific areas
- that Jefferson collected books on will take this further and develop
- more of our understanding of his familiarity with
- Italian thought. And also to demonstrate that
- Italian thought on many topics was at the center of developments in the
- west and in many ways, in many instances
- was also the the originator of a number of concepts.
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