Cyprus and the Renaissance (1450-1650)

This collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars in the field is the product of an international research project on early modern Cypriot culture. Preliminary versions of the essays have been discussed during an expert meeting of the contributors (November 2009, at the University of Cyprus). Cyprus, a kingdom from 1191 to 1570, passed from Frankish to Venetian domination; its population - Greek, French, Italian, Eastern Christians - experienced multifaceted religious paradigms and rich intellectual exchanges and productions. Its heritage from antiquity, its monasteries, its chanceries, which received and reproduced manuscripts then printed books, its geopolitically pivotal site on East-West trade routes, attracted numerous Franks, diverse officials of course, but others as well. The cultural magnet enticed deeper interests than those of tourism. Foreign intellectuals arrived with their own missions and aspirations, returning with no little Cypriot baggage. Concurrently, Cypriots from noble or wealthy merchant families forayed abroad often for long sojourns amidst Italian or West-European intellectual milieu, all the while maintaining relations with home. Continuous to and fro of Europeans, many of them Venetian, the island's importance to military and economic strategies, and the allure conferred by mythological past, stimulated and fostered a generous descriptive and allusive literature. To date, study of this Cypriot intellectual life, of exchanges with Western Europe, has been fragmentary, with the exception of Gilles Grivaud's long 1993 essay in Greek, published in French: Entrelacs chiprois: essai sur la vie intellectuelle dans le royaume de Chypre, 1191-1570 (Nicosia, 2009), a scholarly event opening many doors to new research. The present collection, however, is the first of its kind centered on intellectual exchanges during the Renaissance period, deepening their source-based documentary study, as well as our knowledge of the island's culture and heritage in relation to political, scholarly and religious life in Western countries. The volume assures considerable range and also offers new and ground-breaking discoveries, insights and perspectives: linguistics (Baglioni), the political deployment of Cypriot cultural heritage and its antiquities in archeology and art (Calvelli; Parlato), intellectual networks interweaving Cypriot, Italian and French intellectuals (Nicolaou-Konnari; Procaccioli; Chayes; Parlato), Cypriot engagement in contemporary philosophical debates and the reception of Greek philosophical manuscripts taken from Cyprus (Grivaud; Prins), Cypriot contribution to contemporary Italian literature, the representation of the island in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian literature and historiography (Cosentino; Girotto; Nicolaou-Konnari; Schabel), Italian heterodoxy and Inquisition in relation to catholic reformation and counter-reformation on Cyprus (Skoufari; Chayes), the description of Cypriot wildlife in Renaissance sources and an attempt to reconstruct the islands's wildlife during that period (Arbel).