The Italian humanist Pietro Bembo is credited to be one of the first early modern writers to describe the ascent to a volcano from personal experience. And yet, as he was writing his essay on the Sicilian Mount Etna in the late fifteenth century, not only was the volcanic imaginary still deeply steeped in Greco-Roman mythology, but European languages lacked a name for volcanos—volcanos were described as “mountains of smoke.” It is only with the colonization of the so-called “New World” in the sixteenth century, in particular the European incursions in Guatemala and Mexico, that the neologism “volcano” was introduced, via Central America, in various European languages. This presentation centres on three authors, whose writings are closely tied to the history and philology of the volcano: John Mandeville, Pietro Bembo and Pedro Alvarado.
Speaker Bio:
Katharina N. Piechocki is an Associate Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at UBC. Her monograph, “Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe” (University of Chicago Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the European Studies Book Award in 2022, awarded for a 2-year period (Council for European Studies, Columbia University). Katharina is the co-editor of a special double issue of “Romance Quarterly” on the topic of early modern “Clouds” (2021) and is currently completing a monograph, tentatively titled “Procreative Poetics: Hercules and the Rise of the Opera Libretto.” She is the founder and co-director of the “Cartography Seminar” in Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.
