Emanuele Lugli: Recovering Ancient Standards During the Renaissance

Dr. Emanuele Lugli is an assistant professor in Stanford University's Art & Art History Department, and specializes in the late medieval and early modern periods. Widely published, Dr. Lugli specializes in questions of scale and labor, the history of measurements and technology, conceptualizations of precision, vagueness, smallness, and the reach of intellectual networks.

His talk, "Timeless Measuring: On Recovering Ancient Standards During the Renaissance," looks at the tremendous interest that early sixteenth-century antiquarians developed for metrology. From Guillaume Budé at the French court to Erasmus in Freiburg, scholars debated the correct sizes of Greek and Roman standards to make classical descriptions of ancient life come alive, or so they wrote. This talk, however, does not take their words at face value. Instead, it asks whether Renaissance authors' interests in measuring and standardization were produced by philological research or, on the contrary, its prerequisite. What if metrology were not a field of inquiry but an epistemological precondition that antiquarians embraced to undertake historical quests in the first place? And what if the belief in measuring that Renaissance scholars developed were not restricted to the Renaissance but affected the very notion of historical possibility even today?

If you would like to attend this talk in person, we will be providing lunch from Blend Eatery. Please order here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc06Y__UD4WNp5o4Ck-FeYRL3dL3A3…