Rare Book Room lecture series: Exploring the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili with Dr. James Russell
Among the many treasures of the Grosvenor Rare Book Room is an exceptional early printed book, which combines a love story and an alchemical treatise in one. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or “Strive of Love in a Dream of He Who Loves Many Things” has been praised as one of the most beautiful books of the Renaissance; it is also one of the most bizarre. The romance features the lovers Poliphilo and Polia as they journey towards each other across a dreamscape filled with the monuments of lost antiquity. Written in 1499 in a made-up language, one that combines Latin and Italian without becoming either, and featuring sumptuous woodcut illustrations of impossible buildings, the Hypnerotomachia seems at first like an inaccessible marvel of the early age of print, a book to be admired more than read.
Yet Buffalo’s copy at shelfmark RBR ALDUS 1499.C7 indicates that Renaissance readers did indeed read the text, as shown by the extraordinarily abundant notes, or marginalia, that they left across its pages. There are no less than five readers in the Buffalo copy who engaged with this unusual book across a variety of interests, from identifying the sources for its architecture to guessing the etymologies of its constructed words. Most notably, the fifth hand read the text as an encoded allegory of alchemy. This reader presumed that the characters and monuments in the text each represented a chemical component of the alchemical “Great Work” of transmuting base elements into gold. This fifth hand infers magical secrets beneath the veil of the love story and its “strife in a dream.”
Rare book researcher Dr. James Russell examined the Buffalo Hypnerotomachia during his doctoral dissertation (https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10757/) on the annotators of this exceptional book, building on the prior research of Dr. Dario Brancato and Dr. Amy Graves. For his Ph.D. project, Dr. Russell also examined copies of Hypnerotomachia in the Vatican Library and the British Library. He can say with confidence that the Buffalo copy is one of the world’s most prolifically and exceptionally annotated. Having met Heather Gring at a virtual seminar on rare book collecting, the idea came up of Dr. Russell giving a talk for the public at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Libraries. Join us for a very rare opportunity to learn more about this important text in the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library's Rare Book Room.
The lecture will take place in the Ring of Knowledge, just outside of the Grosvenor Room.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3487469-0
