Dr Maria Clotilde Camboni, Honorary Research Fellow, has published a public engagement article in The Conversation UK presenting a recent discovery concerning a Renaissance manuscript preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The article explains how a chance encounter with a sixteenth-century maiolica plate led to the identification of the manuscript — a partial copy of a now-lost anthology of early Italian poetry — as having once belonged to Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua (1474–1539), one of the most significant female collectors of the Italian Renaissance. By analysing Renaissance imprese (personal emblems) found both on the plate and in the manuscript, Dr Camboni was able to reconstruct its earlier ownership and shed new light on the circulation of the rare poems it preserves among elite readers.
The piece introduces a wider audience to the cultural and historical significance of Isabella d’Este, the role of personal emblems in Renaissance identity and ownership practices, and the transmission of early Italian vernacular poetry in the sixteenth century. It builds on a recent academic publication on the same material, which forms part of Dr Camboni’s ongoing research on the Renaissance reception of early Italian poetry.
The article is freely available to read here: https://theconversation.com/what-a-renaissance-plate-reveals-about-a-woman-who-shaped-literary-history-273654
A previous public engagement article on the now-lost anthology can be found here: https://theconversation.com/how-a-lost-manuscript-revealed-the-first-poets-of-italian-literature-150777
The related open-access research article is available here: https://doi.org/10.54103/2282-7447/26679