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alrighty its time to do some wikipedia spelunking on The Republic Of Letters let's see... first known occurrence is in a letter by Francesco Barbaro (1390-1454) to Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). Let's start there... plot their births against other historical figures for context https://t.co/AyNkiwsyJf
Barbaro was from a wealthy Venetian family – here's a statue of him in Santa Maria Zobenigo, which is a church that's still active today it seems... family started in ~836 and ended with Napoleon's conquest of Venice, it looks like https://t.co/afmz7YrijA
anyway yea Francesco Barbaro was appointed senator of Venice, governor of Vicenza, Bergamo, Verona... was the ambassador to Mantua, then Milan... busy guy, all that governance... found time to do some nerd shit too! Wrote a treatise on marriage to celebrate a Medici's wedding... https://t.co/KVtUGdxtU1
ok then we have Poggio, who doesn't have a statue, but he was a Papal Secretary... early Renaissance humanist, rediscovered many lost classical Latin manuscripts decaying and forgotten in monastic libraries... born and died in Florence! 🤔 studied under a protoge of Petrarch... https://t.co/BTsukMn2z1
he was a Papal Secretary for FIFTY YEARS, serving a total of seven popes, starting with Boniface IX https://t.co/Lya2FsuHCZ
Boniface 9 (1389–1404) his wiki article does not seem unbiased, lol. idk. i'm tired. anyway that's all the bonifaces. we have not had another boniface in 600+ years. there's a dormant twitter account tho. https://t.co/k7toPjyXL6 https://t.co/jXkrDGwuPb
Poggio considered himself a Florentine working for the papacy, was text buddies with Cosimo Medici... and damn, this mf had 14 kids with one woman, abandoned her, and married a 17 year old (with whom he had 6 more kids), and wrote about why he was right to do it https://t.co/NrqLDzh6bZ
Poggio had a quarrel with a Lorenzo Valla, and Erasmus got involved somehow this part of this wiki page is kinda flowery and sus, lol Erasmus got involved... lol Erasmus considered Poggio indecent. much drama in the 1450s, dunkin' and subtweeting and all that noise https://t.co/Z06rpgAtt3
ok this is the sort of thing I'm trying to get a sense of. basically the thing they had in common was a mutual interest in retrieving ancient greco-roman manuscripts. they wanted to retvrn to the wisdom of antiquity, and this was right about the time the printing press happened https://t.co/fdzcQm3nNc
Poggio wrote a History of Florence from 1350 to 1455, written in "avowed imitation of of Livy and Sallust, and possibly Thucydides" a lesson I've been learning from reading a bunch of these old timers is that a way to be influential is to write reference material. 1400s SEO
@visakanv Whoa, "The men of letters" from Supernatural TV show isn't a fictional group? https://t.co/Zzx3HchtZS