Gábor Mihály Tóth
Balliol College
Supervisor: Dr Nicholas Davidson
Thesis title: Exploring the thinking of a Florentine merchant, Giovanni Rucellai and his Zibaldone
Research Interest
In my doctoral research I study the thinking and knowledge of the fifteenth century Florentine merchant, Giovanni Rucellai by analyzing his commonplace and family records book, the MS Zibaldone Quaresimale (Archivio Rucellai, Florence). Giovanni, the well-known patron of art, composed this manuscript with the purpose of giving instructions and information to his sons. Due to its encyclopedic nature, this manuscript is a towering example of the late-medieval Florentine tradition of commonplace books or zibaldoni. Through-out my research, I have encoded the codex in TEI XML, and now I am transforming this into a semantically annotated corpus. In short, I study five elementary domains of human thought in the manuscript: agents and agency, conceptual network, space and time. My broader research interest includes the social and intellectual history of fifteenth century Italy, Cognitive Sciences and Digital Humanities. In addition to my doctoral research, I am currently working on late-medieval Florentine dream interpretations.
Past projects
Between 2007 and 2010 I extensively researched a fifteenth century Venetian diplomatic report about medieval Hungary. The so-called Landus report can be dated to 1462 / 63, therefore, it is one of the earliest surviving Venetian country descriptions or relazioni in Italian. During my research, I managed to identify two hitherto unknown manuscript witnesses of the report and I proved that the document was authored by a Venetian ambassador and not by Hyeronimus Landus, a papal nuntio, as Hungarian historians thought earlier. Even though I have accomplished this research, I have an ongoing interest in the history of early-modern information culture and diplomacy.
Publications
- Trivulzuana Cod. N. 1458: A new testimony of the “Landus report”, Verbum Analecta Neolatina X.
- Using Culture, Giovanni Rucellai’s knowledge constructing practice in the MS Zibaldone Quaresimale, Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU XVI.
- “Dispaccio di Landus,” vicende storiche di una relazione veneziana quattrocentesca dell’ Ungheria, in: Dal testo
alla rete, Atti e documenti del convegno internazionale per dottorandi, Budapest, 2010.