Giacomo da Scarperia

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Geography by Ptolemy, Latin manuscript of the early 15th century, translation by Giacomo da Scarperia

Giacomo d'Angelo da Scarperia or Scarparia[1] (Jacobus Angelus[2]) was a Renaissance humanist, born in Florence. He hastened to Venice, when Manuel Chrysoloras had arrived as an envoy of Manuel Paleologus in 1393 and had stayed to teach Greek in Italy for the first time in seven centuries. He decided to return with Chrysoloras to Constantinople — the first Florentine to do so — in company with Guarino da Verona, to immerse himself in advanced Greek studies under Demetrios Kydones.[3] Coluccio Salutati wrote to urge Giacomo to search the libraries there for texts especially of Homer, and for lexicons of the Greek language, with the result that Giacomo translated Ptolemy's Geographia into Latin in 1406: he dedicated it first to Pope Gregory IX, and then in 1409 rededicated it to Alexander V.[4] He also brought new texts of Homer, Aristotle and Plato to the attention of western scholars.

Notes

  1. ↑ Scarperia is a village in the Mugello.
  2. ↑ He was not, however, the only scholar known under the name Jacobus Angelus; Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (Columbia University Press) 1923:80-83, notes the Jakob Engelhart (Jacobus Angelus) of Ulm who wrote a treatise on the Great Comet of 1402, first printed in 1490, at Memmingen, Bavaria; and the Jacobus Angeli who taught at Montpellier in 1426 and was chancellor there 1433-55.
  3. ↑ John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship 1908:II, 19.
  4. ↑ Thorndike 1923:81f
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