Phyllis Goodhart Gordan | |
---|---|
Born | Phyllis Walter Goodhart October 4, 1913 |
Died | |
Education | Bryn Mawr College |
Occupation | Scholar |
Spouse | John Dozier Gordan |
Parent(s) | Howard Lehman Goodhart, Marjorie Walter |
Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan (4 October 1913 - 24 January 1994) was a rare book and manuscript collector and a leading scholar of the Renaissance, known for her research into the life of Poggio Bracciolini.
Phyllis Walter Goodhart was born on October 4, 1913, to Howard Lehman Goodhart and Marjorie Walter. Phyllis' uncle was Arthur Lehman Goodhart, and her great-grandfather was Mayer Lehman. [1] She attended Brearley School in New York City and then went on to Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in Latin, graduating in 1935. She attended Radcliffe College from 1935 to 1938, receiving her M.A. in Latin, Greek, and paleography. [2] [3] She married John Dozier Gordan in 1938, and they had one son and three daughters.
Gordan's life work of editing, translating, and annotating the letters of Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolò de' Niccoli resulted in the 1974 publication of Two Renaissance Book Hunters (Columbia University Press). [1] Her interest in Renaissance manuscripts and her study of Bracciolini's search for "lost" texts fueled her own collecting. Her father, Howard Lehman Goodhart, supported and encouraged her research by amassing a notable collection of incunabula and Renaissance manuscripts. [4] After her father's death in 1951, Gordan continued to seek out and collect rare materials from the Medieval and Renaissance eras. [5]
Gordan was a lllTrustee at Bryn Mawr and a founding member of the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library in 1951. [6] She was a charter member of The Renaissance Society of America, serving as lllPresident from 1967 to 1968. Gordan was the first woman appointed to the American Academy in Rome's lllBoard of lllTrustees in 1971. [7] She was also a lifelong supporter of New York Public Library, serving as a Trustee from 1974 to 1985. [8]
Gordan died on January 24, 1994. [9] Following her death, The Renaissance Society of America created the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize in her memory. [10] The American Academy in Rome awards pre- and post-doctoral student winners of the Rome Prize in Phyllis G. Gordan's name. [11] Most of Gordan's book and manuscript collections were donated to Bryn Mawr College and the New York Public Library. In 2016, Bryn Mawr College hosted a symposium dedicated to Gordan's memory, entitled Poggio Bracciolini and the Re(dis)covery of Antiquity: Textual and Material Traditions. [12]
ManuelChrysoloras was a Byzantine Greek classical scholar, humanist, philosopher, professor, and translator of ancient Greek texts during the Renaissance. Serving as the ambassador for the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos in medieval Italy, he became a renowned teacher of Greek literature and history in the republics of Florence and Venice, and today he's widely regarded as a pioneer in the introduction of ancient Greek literature to Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages.
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Founded as a Quaker institution in 1885, Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sister colleges, a group of historically women's colleges in the United States. It is one of 15 Quaker colleges in the United States. The college has an enrollment of about 1,350 undergraduate students and 450 graduate students. It was the first women's college to offer graduate education through a PhD.
Antiqua is a style of typeface used to mimic styles of handwriting or calligraphy common during the 15th and 16th centuries. Letters are designed to flow, and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion; in this way it is often contrasted with Fraktur-style typefaces where the individual strokes are broken apart. The two typefaces were used alongside each other in the germanophone world, with the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute often dividing along ideological or political lines. After the mid-20th century, Fraktur fell out of favor and Antiqua-based typefaces became the official standard in Germany.
Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, usually referred to simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early Renaissance humanist. He was responsible for rediscovering and recovering many classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries. His most celebrated finds are De rerum natura, the only surviving work by Lucretius, De architectura by Vitruvius, lost orations by Cicero such as Pro Sexto Roscio, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Statius' Silvae, and Silius Italicus's Punica, as well as works by several minor authors such as Frontinus' De aquaeductu, Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae, Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper, and Eutyches.
Niccolò de' Niccoli was an Italian Renaissance humanist.
Martha Carey Thomas was an American educator, suffragist, and linguist. She was the second president of Bryn Mawr College, a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Pedro da Fonseca was a Portuguese Cardinal who served as Bishop of Astorga, 1414–1418, and Bishop of Sigüenza, 1419–1422.
The Old Library is a college library at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Previously named the M. Carey Thomas Library after Bryn Mawr's first dean and second president, it was formally renamed in 2018 as a result of controversy surrounding Thomas's history of racism and anti-Semitism. The building was in use as a library until 1970, when the Mariam Coffin Canaday Library opened. Today, it is primarily a space for performances, readings, lectures, and public gatherings.
The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) is an academic association founded in 1954 supporting the study of the Renaissance period, 1300–1650. The RSA brings together scholars from many backgrounds in a wide variety of disciplines from North America and around the world. RSA has over 5,000 members at universities and colleges as professors, instructors, and graduate students; at museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions; independent scholars; and many others interested in Renaissance studies. Its headquarters are in New York City; the annual meeting takes place in changing cities within North America and in Europe.
Humanist minuscule is a handwriting or style of script that was invented in secular circles in Italy, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. "Few periods in Western history have produced writing of such great beauty", observes the art historian Millard Meiss. The new hand was based on Carolingian minuscule, which Renaissance humanists, obsessed with the revival of antiquity and their role as its inheritors, took to be ancient Roman:
[W]hen they handled manuscript books copied by eleventh- and twelfth-century scribes, Quattrocento literati thought they were looking at texts that came right out of the bookshops of ancient Rome".
The Facetiae is an anthology of jokes by Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), first published in 1470. It was the first printed joke book. The collection, "the most famous jokebook of the Renaissance", is notable for its inclusion of scatological jokes and tales, six of the tales involving flatulation humor and six involving defecation.
The Bryn Mawr College Deanery was the campus residence of the first Dean and second President of Bryn Mawr College, Martha Carey Thomas, who maintained a home there from 1885 to 1933. Under the direction of Thomas, the Deanery was greatly enlarged and lavishly decorated for entertaining the college's important guests, students, and alumnae, as well as Thomas’ own immediate family and friends. From its origins as a modest five room Victorian cottage, the Deanery grew into a sprawling forty-six room mansion which included design features from several notable 19th and 20th century artists. The interior was elaborately decorated with the assistance of the American artist Lockwood de Forest and Louis Comfort Tiffany, de Forest's partner in the design firm Tiffany & de Forest, supplied a number of light fixtures of Tiffany glass. De Forest's design of the Deanery's so-called 'Blue Room' is particularly important as it is often considered one of the best American examples of an Aesthetic Movement interior, alongside the Peacock Room by James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In addition, John Charles Olmsted, of the Olmsted Brothers landscape design firm, designed a garden adjacent to the Deanery, which also contained imported works of art from Syria, China, and Italy. The Deanery's beauty and rich history established the Deanery as a cherished space on campus and an icon of Bryn Mawr College.
Albinia Catherine de la Mare,, known in print as A.C. de la Mare and informally as “Tilly”, was an English librarian and palaeographer who specialised in Italian Renaissance manuscripts.
Myra L. Uhlfelder (1923-2011) was a professor of classics at Bryn Mawr. She is known for her work on classical and Medieval Latin.
Michele Renee Salzman is a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is an expert on the religious and social history of late antiquity.
Patricia Fortini Brown is Professor Emerita of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.
Julia Haig Gaisser is an American classical scholar. She is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus of the Humanities and Professor of Latin at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. She specializes in Latin poetry and its reception by Renaissance humanists.
The Codex Hersfeldensis was a manuscript from the Early Middle Ages. Written between 830 and 850, the codex was found in Hersfeld Abbey in the first half of the 15th century. The codex was brought to Italy by Enoch of Ascoli in 1455, where it was divided up and copied. The original has since been lost. The Codex Hersfeldensis is considered to be the original source for the surviving manuscripts of the Opera Minora – the shorter works of Tacitus, including the Germania.
Patricia Hochschild Labalme was an American historian and executive director of the Renaissance Society of America.
Margaret Plass MBE (1896–1990) was an American anthropologist, collector of African artefacts and patron of the British Museum alongside her husband, Webster Plass.