An accidental historian: the case of Daniello Bartoli SJ (1608-85)

Followed by the CREMS Summer party! (Drinks and food tbc will be provided!) Book below. 

The author of the first published attempt to write a global history of the Society of Jesus (1653-73) in the vernacular, Bartoli actually did not consider himself an historian. Nor in fact did most of his contemporaries, who admired him for his preaching, his moral essays as well as for his prowess as a natural philosopher (he published on acoustics and on the properties of ice as well as his history of the Society). So how did he come to write a series of volumes which so impressed later readers such as Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), who called him 'the Dante of baroque prose', and whose historical work was reprinted in the nineteenth century to teach school children how to write good Italian? This paper will seek to understand Bartoli in the round: not only as an historian but also as hagiographer, moral essayist as well as natural philosopher.

Simon Ditchfield is Professor of History at the University of York, where he has been since 1991 when he arrived as a British Academy postdoctoral fellow. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan and honorary member of the Italian Hagiography Society (AISSCA). He was co-investigator, together with Helen Smith, of the interdisciplinary research project: 'Conversion narratives in early modern Europe' (2010-13) and director of CREMS (2018-2021). In September 2022 he gave the Singleton Distinguished Lectures at Johns Hopkins University: 'Discovering How to Describe the World in the writings of Daniello Bartoli, SJ (1608-1685)' whose revision for publication should keep him out of mischief after he retires this summer.

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